Comment by Joker_vD

Sorry, my comment was intended to be reply to the one of yours that said

    I/O is done piecewise, a line at a time. The file is never "loaded up". Again
    you're applying an intuition about how parsers are presented to college
    students (suck it all into RAM and build a big in-memory representation of
    the syntax tree) that doesn't match the way actual config file parsers work
    (read a line and interpret it, then read another).

So, the whole file is usually loaded up (if it's short enough). At this point you might as well parse all of it, instead of re-reading it from the disk over and over, and redoing the same work over and over; parsed configs — if they are parsed into falgs/enums, and not literal strings — usually take about the same, or less, memory than a FILE structure from libc does on the whole.

The complexity of the algorithm is about the same, either the early exit is here or it isn't (in fact, the version with the early exit, now that I think of it, has larger cyclotomatic complexity but whatever).