Tagged by 'binary compatibility'

Most of the software applications I have worked on have demonstrated the following properties:

the application has a longevity far beyond the original forecast,
the binary file formats change dramatically over time,
these binary files can be shared between different versions of the same application,
more and more binary file handling code is developed to handle the different file formats,
sooner or later, applications break trying to read the various binary file versions.

This article proposes a method to prevent such breakages.