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“Colon-separated files” are not unstructured though. And arguing that s-expressions are more expressive than text because “text” excludes all structured example

• kbp 8y ago
  But Unix didn't adopt everything-is-colon-separated-values. Everything being unstructured text leads to a lot of different, incompatible ways of structuring that text. S-expressions themselves aren't important, I think, it's just having some standard structure that's used everywhere and you don't have to parse yourself. Trees are a good choice for a universal structure, hence things like XML. S-expressions are just a very lightweight and flexible format.
• adrianmonk 8y ago
  Obviously I mean degrees of structure, not an absolute lack of structure. The goal of the definition isn't to give S-expressions an advantage so they can be proven superior and Lisp people can win the argument. It's to describe the sorts of files that actual existing command-line utilities (like this in Unix/Linux) can conveniently operate on. The "head" command deals in line-oriented fashion and can print the first N lines of a file. The "cut" command can select certain columns based on a line-oriented and character-delimited structure. There is no exact definition, but this gives you a general idea of what text files means in the context of "becoming a command line wizard".