They give you a less than construct and a greater than construct, now that's luxury.

Files do start off with "Magic Numbers" that tell the computer what type they are, but a whole lot of programs are content to ignore them.

Yeah, I'd say programming includes the stuff an architect would do. Coding is just the part where you put lexemes to files.

It depends. I've never used git, but hg is a dream compared to SVN. Yeah, some of it is the plug-ins for eclipse and such just being so better, but trying to resolve conflicts is so much less awful. Committing locally-only when you hit a 'save point' is also a nice advantage, especially when you can keep adding changes to one commit as a logical unit if that's what you want since no one is commiting locally-to-you, then you only have to merge when you're done.

I prefer mercurial, personally. The thing about SVN that really gets me for mercurial is the local only "save points". I don't want to publish even to the other developers little pieces of half-working features as I muddle through repairs. It lets me be even more reckless about wiping out bad code.