Neural Nettwork (ANN) Extension

[litdev]

Text and binary refer to how the data is stored in a file.  The data itself is just a set of numbers, can be integers, real or even just 0 and 1s.

If we store the data as text in the file, we just store the numbers with one byte per decimal character, reasonably efficient when the numbers are just 0 or 1, but if the numbers have loads of figures like say 3.14159265358979 (the standard number of characters for a real number in SB), then this is 17 bytes including a deliminator space character.  The number can be stored with just 4 (or maybe 8) bytes if it is stored as binary.  Text data in a file is human readable, binary data is not, but may take less space and be faster to read and write since it is already in the internal memory binary format for a number.

Google 'text and binary file storage'.