Parsing can become accidentally quadratic because of sscanf
Another example of so many things wrong with the status quo.(1) Naive people find liberation in text-based protocols that don't require tools to understand.(2) With experience one finds that variable-length data structures are much more treacherous than fixed-length data structures:  you find simplicity instead in binary data formats that are dead easy to parse.(3) Floating point numbers are astonishingly expensive to parse and unparse to ASCII compared to how many FLOPs you could do in that time.  All that,  for a function that isn't quite correct...  That is,  the number 1/5,  which you write as "0.2" doesn't actually exist in IEEE floats.  You don't notice at first because that number unparses as "0.2" -- but then note that "0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3" is false in most computer languages.(4) Null-terminated strings are the definition of insanity, rivaled only by "pointers are integers, integers are pointers"One pet project of mine lately is a "Data Assembler" that takes a graph of data structures (say test data for a family of logic chips,  graphics data for a laser light show,  or "maps" to upload to the engine control unit in your car) in Python and converts it to a byte array that is incorporated into an Arduino program.The total size of the structure could be up to 32kbytes on a small device, or up to 250kbytes or so on a big device,  but the program memory is huge compared to the RAM which might be as little as 2kb so the unpacking code is going to stream the data with a small working area.The minimum it has to do is put together blocks of data that have references to one another that are only resolved once all of the blocks are otherwise complete.I deliberated a lot about how to handle variable length data structures and decided to embed a two-byte length before the block for all blocks.  I could have saved some bytes when the length of the structure was known,  but then I'd have to figure out how to code lengths then (e.g. for an array of 2-byte ints do I count the ints or bytes) and figured I'd make up my mind once.