Because the objects are probably either relatively deeply encoded inside hundreds of plain-C stack and heap locations, or they're not even fully resident in RAM anymore by the time output occurs.
It's not that uncommon for ol' C hackers to directly write those stack and heap locations out to disk and call it a "file format." Trouble is, you're almost entirely at the whims of your platform and compiler as to what the actual layout of that is.
If you're thinking, "well that's dumb, why doesn't C have a standardized representation for those in-memory objects that hides platform differences", it does: printf and scanf.
Text isn't necessarily a great answer to that problem, but it definitely is an answer. Others include packed structs with htonl and friends and low-overhead serialization formats like protobuf, Thrift, and Avro. Inside, say, Google, you have "everything is a protobuf" instead of "everything is text," and it does end up working roughly as well as you might expect. That is to say, reasonably well, but with its own sets of problems that people won't ever stop complaining about.
It's not that uncommon for ol' C hackers to directly write those stack and heap locations out to disk and call it a "file format." Trouble is, you're almost entirely at the whims of your platform and compiler as to what the actual layout of that is.
If you're thinking, "well that's dumb, why doesn't C have a standardized representation for those in-memory objects that hides platform differences", it does: printf and scanf.
Text isn't necessarily a great answer to that problem, but it definitely is an answer. Others include packed structs with htonl and friends and low-overhead serialization formats like protobuf, Thrift, and Avro. Inside, say, Google, you have "everything is a protobuf" instead of "everything is text," and it does end up working roughly as well as you might expect. That is to say, reasonably well, but with its own sets of problems that people won't ever stop complaining about.