| Neat; thanks for posting this! I just started tinkering with ideas in the same line of thinking a couple weeks ago; it’s good to see that there’s prior art to learn from. I landed in the same place they did, on using XML. I think there’re a couple of advantages over S-Expressions: * There’s always a tag. So it’s like everything is a special form. Being able to omit the tag in sexprs is nice syntactic sugar, but I’m not expecting that anyone would be writing this code in text by hand (although it’s useful to preserve the ability to do so), and I’d rather have the clarity and explicit terminators. * Namespaces are a killer feature - that’s what makes it an open datastructure, allowing you to incorporate multiple dialects at different semantic levels. (You can tell I’ve been using MLIR a lot the past few years… :-) * There’s a whole ecosystem of standards and tools around it. Need a standard fragment identifier? Or to canonicalize an entity? There’s a good body of specs, carefully worked out by people more experienced than I. I dunno about their Python approach; I was thinking of a structure editor (and trying to avoid all the historical pitfalls of structure editors, which will be tricky). We’ll see how it goes. :-) Thanks again for the pointer! |