[timthorn]

What's not machine readable about an ASCII table? A fixed width table has its own advantages over eg CSV - for instance, to read a specific field you can reach it by offset rather than having to count delimiters.

[cwmma]

fixed width might have technical advantages but CSV has the advantage of being able to be read by a lot of things out of the box.

[timthorn]

So does fixed width. Excel, MySQL, R, Perl... :)