[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()".