Some interesting points, but I think you’ve missed a trick with your point about MS Word – not only is it fairly trivial to linearize a tree structure (some XML, for example), but you gain a fairly significant speed advantage reading and writing binary data as compared to text (something which will matter in the commercial market place – let alone the fact that, as you mention, it can be difficult to reverse engineer a binary file if you don’t know what you’re looking for). It is for this reason that many popular file formats are available in both text and binary forms: for example(s) Maya’s files (.mb and .ma), the well-known Stereolithography format (.stl can contain ascii or binary), Parasolid files (.x_t and .x_b), etc etc. – Another point worth bringing up (particularly in relation to the file types I’ve mentioned) is the ability to _choose_ between text or binary, which gives you, as a user of the file type, the option to inspect your output data as text or to load/save quickly as binary.

Yea really

Trying to convert ‘Hi’ in word to Ascii equivalent you 226 128 152 072 105 226 128 153 while the letters Hi are clear the quotes at either end have become something else

The binary equivalent is 11100010 10000000 10011000 01001000 01101001 11100010 10000000 10011001 yet in note pad the same phrase is 00100111 01001000 01101001 .

A programme requiring a password accepts Notepad but not the Word 2013 equivalent. I try telling the company that gave me the password, but they tell me I am wrong. What do you think?