Maintaining sum+count is more expensive than you'd imagine... Because to maintain the sum, you need to convert the numbers from ascii to decimal. And to do t

Maintaining sum+count is more expensive than you'd imagine... Because to maintain the sum, you need to convert the numbers from ascii to decimal. And to do that you at least need to know the memory alignment of the number and the position of the decimal point. All far more expensive than the state machine approach which is pretty much 'alignment doesn't matter, ascii doesn't matter, we're gonna just handle all possible states that could end up in a 32 bit register').