[AnthonyMouse]

> "Text" only makes a good lowest common denominator on UNIX because the designers of UNIX decided that ASCII would be the lowest common denominator of the system. The designers of modern Windows decided that MSIL objects would be their lowest common denominator.

"Text" makes a good lowest common denominator because it's low. Everything, including humans looking at it, can deal with text. Essentially all programming languages on all platforms provide basic primitives analogous to getline(), find_first_of(), substr(), etc. You can take text from Unix and easily do something useful with it on any arbitrary platform.

MSIL assumes an entire infrastructure that isn't universally available. You can't take MSIL from Windows and easily do something useful with it on any arbitrary platform. It requires you to have a solid .NET virtual machine for your operating system, an API for dealing with MSIL, bindings for that API in every language you want to use, etc.

[tatterdemalion]

Users of System360 computers, which used EBCDIC instead of ASCII, might not agree with you about the inherent portability of ASCII-based text interchange. Not saying .NET objects are as portable, but it's a continuum and a trade off.

[AnthonyMouse]

ASCII and EBCDIC are just different ways of encoding the same information. It's like saying comma-delimited files aren't portable because there are also tab-delimited files and some programs support one or the other. It doesn't matter because there are trivial, widely available utilities to convert between them.

There is nothing analogous to convert MSIL to. EBCDIC and ASCII both have a representation for 'A'. Only .NET has "Microsoft.Win32.Registry.CurrentUser.CreateSubKey()".