[drostie]

I actually don't think that would be all bad if you in addition paired some parsers and serializers for other formats in your standard library.

That could actually be a really fun language: "you can write this in Haskell-syntax, Python-syntax, or C-syntax, we don't care, just make sure that you enclose it in the corresponding

    <parse-as lang="c">
    // ...
    </parse-as>

and then `myprogram.c.x` will get compiled to `myprogram.x` which is a standard XML file, which you can then edit with `x-to-py myprogram.x >myprogram.py.x && vim myprogram.py.x` and have a field day of it."

Sort of like the PL equivalent of Lennon's Imagine.

[falcolas]

It was moderately more complicated that this, as it represented the actual program tree structure within XML. Imagine lisp with XML tags in place of parentheses.