Honestly its rather simple. When it is parsed, it is stored in a dictionary of string values. Strings aren't a simple data type but a class instance which uses up quite a lot more data than an integer or similar types.
When you consider 203 strings per line and thousands of lines, it adds up very quickly. It could be easily optimized to a very large extent, however it makes the program more complicated and thus not really worth the effort when most modern computers have large amounts of ram.
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