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Hi Folks, Distinguishing "text" versus "binary" is important. On October 30 we had a discussion titled, "Is the binary file format dead?" During that discussion John Cowan made an excellent distinction between binary and text files. I thought it would be useful to summarize the distinction. The universe of computer files falls into two categories: 1. Binary files 2. Text files By convention we normally restrict "binary" to files which are not interpretable as streams of characters. [John Cowan] The word "text" is applied to files which are interpretable as streams of characters. Of course any text file is also a binary file, since the class of text files is obtained from the class of binary files by applying restrictions. But it would be confusing to call a text file a binary file; it would be like calling a cat
a mammal: correct but imprecise.
/Roger |
