[thurston]

Colm has built-in serialization. There is still some work to do in this area though. Colm will preserve whitespace for minimal disruption of untransformed text, but figuring out what to do at the boundaries between modified and unmodified trees can be tricky.

You are right, people want to use general purpose languages for the more complex algorithms. I agree a means of embedding is necessary and I have kept this in mind, though not yet achieved it. I would very much like to be able to parse, transform, then have the option to import the data into another environment and carry on there.

[haberman]

Thanks for the info. What is the built-in serialization format?

[thurston]

Just plain old text as it came in. I see now that is not what you were referring to. You're talking about JSON, XML, etc I now think.

There is also a print_xml function, which puts the tree into XML, but it's mostly used for debugging at this point, not export to other systems. I'm hoping that with time these kinds of features will crop up.