Numeric read seems too strict

[wren romano]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 11:03 AM, David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com> wrote:
> By the way, I believe we should be able to read numbers more efficiently by
> parsing them directly instead of lexing first. We have to deal with
> parentheses, white space, and signs uniformly for all number types. Then
> specialized foldl'-style code *should* be able to parse integral and
> fractional numbers faster than any lex-first scheme.

I follow the part about parentheses and negations, but I'm not sure I
get the rest of what you mean. E.g., I'm not sure how any parser could
be faster than what bytestring-lexing does for Fractional and Integral
types (ignoring the unoptimized hex and octal functions). What am I
missing?

-- 
Live well,
~wren