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

Uhm… because human-readable file formats can be read by humans? Seems like a pretty good reason to me.

(Well, for configuration files it’s inevitable that they are read (and edited!) by humans. Files for persistent storage of some sort or the other don’t really need to be read or edited by humans.)