> 2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
A good way to enforce this is to encrypt the data at the beginning of the process.
Then any function that returns structured data is clearly foolish and can be marked for removal.
What does the quote mean?
As you point out, I would prefer to parse a text string as early as possible, so that I could pass around structured data instead of having to parse the same string over and over.
That seems so obvious that I can't imagine what the author meant.