This makes it easier to debug testcases: - the entity numbers in a .cton file match the entity numbers used within Cretonne. - serializing and deserializing doesn't cause indices to change. One disadvantage is that if a .cton file uses sparse entity numbers, deserializing to the in-memory form doesn't compact it. However, the text format is not intended to be performance-critical, so this isn't expected to be a big burden.