At the moment I can open up source code in almost any language up in any text editor. It just has to know the encoding and vomit out characters I can comprehend and get the line breaks right. I can print it out and have a hard copy which represents what was written by the programmer. Send it and receive it by email and read it.
Code which can be represented as plaintext is versatile and portable and, more importantly, has its comprehensibility decoupled from any specific company, or project or group providing the necessary tools to make it human-readable. If an alternative file format isn't natively human-readable then it is by my definition less readable regardless of the standards put into writing the code itself.
Code which can be represented as plaintext is versatile and portable and, more importantly, has its comprehensibility decoupled from any specific company, or project or group providing the necessary tools to make it human-readable. If an alternative file format isn't natively human-readable then it is by my definition less readable regardless of the standards put into writing the code itself.