General use compression algorithms suck at both ratio and speed when it comes to compressing integers. ASCII numbers are strictly inferior to even varint (base128) encoding. And varint is junk (in bulk) compared to int formats like PFor or Simple16 etc.<p>You&#x27;re arguing that a format with fixed width is worse. Sure. So what about fixed width text protocols? Nothing stops the spec writers from requiring leading zeros. Just like nothing stops binary protocols from using varint. The reason you want fixed width, though, is because it&#x27;s so easy and fast to deal with. It&#x27;s a no-op. TCP&#x2F;IP is so easy because you just deref the message as a struct.