This was possible in the beginning. But then came the moral police and deprived us of this freedom, because they deemed it to be "confusing".
See, for example, The Unix Programming Environment, by Kernighan and Pike, page 51 [0]:
Despite their fundamental properties inside the kernel, directories sit in the file system as ordinary files. They can be read as ordinary files. (...) The time has come to look at the bytes in a directory:
This was possible in the beginning. But then came the moral police and deprived us of this freedom, because they deemed it to be "confusing".
See, for example, The Unix Programming Environment, by Kernighan and Pike, page 51 [0]:
Despite their fundamental properties inside the kernel, directories sit in the file system as ordinary files. They can be read as ordinary files. (...) The time has come to look at the bytes in a directory:
[0] https://archive.org/details/UnixProgrammingEnviornment/page/...