OMG, it reminds me when in college they made us program a database from scratch with binary files. Who wants to use already available and specially designed tools like SQL?
Some teachers seem to think that it's more educative to make a wheel with clay than to build a working bicycle with available materials and less effort.
And localization is so important for beginning programmers to learn... Or for anyone for that matter...
In what platform must you do this? Windows? What compiler must you use or are you using? What libraries are you allowed to use?