Why are spfile contents are readable in text format?

[sidharth mellam]

According to ORACLE, spfile is a binary file in my oracle instance. I could read the content of the spfile with VI.

How is this possible ?

I could read all the parameters in Spfile.

So how this is possible? because spfile is a binary file, we cannot read the content.
It's content can only be altered with

SQL>alter system set <parameter=value> scope=memory or spfile;

[rski]

In fact oracle documentation is half-true. Because spfile is a text file with some binary data at the beggining and the end of the file. So you can read parameters from the spfile but you should not edit spfile with text editor because of binary data in it.