A
format for representing
data used by some
applications. The other main formats for
storing data are
text formats (such as
ASCII and
EBCDIC), in which each
character of data is assigned a specific code number.
Binary formats are used for executable programs and numeric data, whereas text formats are used for textual data. Many files contain a combination of binary and text formats. Such files are usually considered to be binary files even though they contain some data in a text format.
