It really depends on the purpose. For scientific computing, for instance, CSV is used as a "standard" for quick tables of numbers. Sufficiently "normal" files c

It really depends on the purpose. For scientific computing, for instance, CSV is used as a "standard" for quick tables of numbers. Sufficiently "normal" files can be read by almost all scientific tools (speaking of libraries such as numpy, systems such as Mathematica, Maple, or ecosystems such as R, basically even C++ and Fortran allow this task to be implemented in a couple of lines). However, also in this context CSV has major drawbacks, for instance not defining column headers, comment lines, number formatting. A proper drop-in replacement in my subject is HDF5 (https://www.hdfgroup.org/ https://www.hdfgroup.org/) which is mostly used for being a binary representation of n-dimensional tables with couplings to major programming systems. However, I never heard of HDF5 outside of science. Therfore I make this example here.