If you go fully against Robustness principle, you lose the reason to use textual formats as well, since they are designed to be forgiving of human errors in inp

If you go fully against Robustness principle, you lose the reason to use textual formats as well, since they are designed to be forgiving of human errors in input and catch them in syntax. And - it is certainly OK in many instances to have fixed-width, fixed byte-order binary encoding as the format's basis. It comes with the twin downsides of wholly different categories of errors cropping up, and with the lack of a universally agreed upon tool for human entry. Perhaps text was a fashion, though. I definitely have had thoughts in that vein lately. And in that case we shouldn't always be rushing to use it as the source of truth when we have many good, machine-level agreements about numeric formats.