Re: Lest we forget
>ah, if only we could save images into text files and perform image editing with vi!
It is, indeed, very easy to do. Most imaging libraries allow you to save the bitmap of an image to raw text (ImageMagick does, for example). That's one of the safest ways to handle images. It works well, I've used it; I actually designed a few advanced scientific image analysis scripts (5-D image cross-correlation to name but one use) based entirely on text parsing (not using Vi, obviously, that would be an unnecessary overhead). Some are still in use.
That's also how it's done by most scientific software (MatLab, anyone?) but these usually give a whole new meaning to the expression "useless overhead".
