Assuming you are using a deterministic algorithm, like a Deterministic Finite Automaton for regular expressions for your Type-0 languages (eg, the lexer), and s

Assuming you are using a deterministic algorithm, like a Deterministic Finite Automaton for regular expressions for your Type-0 languages (eg, the lexer), and something like LL/LR for the Type-1 languages, then processing time is always O(n), where n is the number of tokens in the input. In the end they are all just table driven state machines, with one lookup per input token. I don't see how they could be made much faster. When he says LR parsers were hard for old machines to handle he was referring to the generating the parsing table which happens once, when the parser itself is created.