Re:Formatting floating point numbers
by userbinator on Friday June 14, 2019 @07:44PM
(#20187565)
Indeed, "human readable" really means "in something similar to English" much of the time, and is a vague and quite subjective term; would someone who knows only English think Chinese is not "human readable"?
Personally, I consider binary formats to be just as readable (from the hexdump, or sometimes even the ASCII directly) and in some ways even easier to parse without ambiguity --- it just requires a bit (pun intended) of learning, like any language. I've worked with someone who could "read" TCP/IP; and I can read much of Z80 and some x86 Asm as well as a few other binary formats.
Personally, I consider binary formats to be just as readable (from the hexdump, or sometimes even the ASCII directly) and in some ways even easier to parse without ambiguity --- it just requires a bit (pun intended) of learning, like any language. I've worked with someone who could "read" TCP/IP; and I can read much of Z80 and some x86 Asm as well as a few other binary formats.