> I’m not sure the text/binary distinction is that useful. Encoding a number in binary takes 4 or 8 bytes. Encoding it in plain text (ASCII or Unicode) takes a

> I’m not sure the text/binary distinction is that useful. Encoding a number in binary takes 4 or 8 bytes. Encoding it in plain text (ASCII or Unicode) takes as many bytes as there are digits, plus one for the sign / decimal separator. If you're talking about ASCII/Unicode, you're not talking about text/binary. > ASCII is much simpler than Unicode encodings I don't disagree with you, but Unicode is not binary. > Does it matter whether one or the other is classified as text or binary? They're both text.