[koralatov]

I don't disagree with you, but how do we decide which structured data format to use as a replacement for plaintext? I have the sneaking feeling that a large part of why we still use plaintext is because it's established already as the standard, for worse or for better, and replacing it with a standard everyone could agree on proved impossible.

[TeMPOraL]

Use whatever and stick to it. The sane structured data formats differ little but by shape of the braces and some punctuation. Were UNIX developers thinking about this back in the days, they'd probably chose s-expressions or something else from that era. Now it may as well be JSON. The thing is, one format should have been picked, and a parser for it should have been available in a system library. Then we wouldn't have to agree on anything, we'd have one system standard to use.

[borplk]

Plaintext is the lazy way out. It's not even remotely a standard because everyone does it differently.

It's the shortest path from thinking "I need to persist this crap" to getting something working. Write the bytes to a file, sprinkle some separators, read and parse it back.