Why should I use a human readable file format?

Question

Why should I use a human readable file format in preference to a binary one? Is there ever a situation when this isn\'t the case?

EDIT: I did have this as an explana

Answer 1

There's something called The Art of Unix Programming.

I won't say it's good or bad, but it's fairly famous. It has a whole chapter called Textuality in which the author asserts that human readable file format are an important part of the Unix way of programming.