Binary v. Text, why is it faster?

I have constantly seen and heard that reading binary data is faster than reading textual data. I have always presumed this to be a fact. But now I am at the point where I would like to understand why.

I was trying to think about it, and it has rather confused me. To my understanding, reading a text file is reading in the bytes which correspond to, for example, ASCII character codes. But if we are dealing with a 1-byte character encoding, how is it slower to read in 'a' rather than some binary representation of that?

And in addition to this, what is the actual difference between binary and textual files? I had always thought that a binary file was simply a file composed of any combination of bytes, whereas a text file was a file composed of a limited subset of the bytes available to a binary file. Am I misunderstanding something here?

I guess I just don't see how reading in AF would be slower just because AF appears in a text file instead of a "binary" file?

- Arctic

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