More to the point, it's so common that it ought to be supported out of the box by any decent programming language, the same way you'd expect any language to sup

More to the point, it's so common that it ought to be supported out of the box by any decent programming language, the same way you'd expect any language to support IEEE floats. That doesn't mean the mechanism for it shouldn't be (effectively) textfile(file("foo.txt")), though.