Exercise

Exercise 29.1: Binary or text file format?

Open one of the saved files in WordPad to see what it looks like. It's in binary form, so will be unreadable gibberish. Can you think of a way to save and load files that are written in readable text form? It can be done, though it takes some extra work. Figuring out how to do it is a good research project. The virtue of having files in readable text form is that you can edit them so as to change the nature of the objects being loaded; of course, there are risks to doing this as careless edits may make the file unreadable. But when developing a program, editable text files can provide a useful debugging tool as well as a kind of 'meta-interface' to the program.