I do have some testing that showed me the Common Lisp was roughly the same speed as the C, when testing against a file of a few dozen megabytes. As I explain, I wasn't interested in optimizing it further, as I feel showing this achieved in just a few minutes to be valuable on its own. I also note that a C programmer may boast about being a small fraction of a second faster, ignoring everything else that goes into the program, which I find foolish.

The reason I didn't strictly adhere to the POSIX behavior was because I don't know where this is documented and don't feel like scanning through the C to find out. On all of the files I've tested, which include a wide array of punctuation and other such things, the results were identical, but I'm merely not making any promises. I'd prefer to not be accused of being one of those Lispers who only complete part of the program; if you look at the libraries I've written, which actually concern me, then you'll find they're well-documented and rather comprehensive for their purposes.