Binary files, text files
What do these terms even mean?
Pragmatically,
- text file = "All data is useful as text"
- characters in a sequence that you could edit at will in the simplest types of "characters after another" style editor
- human-interpretable, human-editable
- binary file = "not just text". It's a catch-all.
- a binary file is one you probably can't edit without severely breaking the present structure
- and where it probably wouldn't occur to you, e.g. because the most useful data isn't text to start with.
- probably not human-readable, probably not human-editable
Even that needs footnotes, and we haven't even gotten technical yet.
'Binary' seems to come from a time before a lot of different file formats existed,
where computer use was computer programming,
and where we mostly had code that humans wrote,
and code in compiled, machine-readable form.
The compiler output was ofetn called 'the binary', and that is still used. So arguably it's short for 'a binary executable' or some such term.