Dear Monks,
maybe I'm just plain stupid here, but I can't help thinking about it.
Most of use probably use a more or less advanced editor while programming perl (and other languages) and we love the syntax-highlighting (aka font-lock) and indention mechanisms. And then from time to time there is an error in the editors machine, like a wrong highlighting after a complex regexp (e.g. put a unescaped '#' into a perl regexp and view with xemacs) or some problems with indention after a POD (xemacs, too; I just don't know any other editors well enough to get to their errors).

Wouldn't it be nice if the language itself would provide an interface to it's parse tree (am I using the word correctly here?), the structure and information of the programm. The language itself probably knows all the secrets/semantics and syntax it has and if it would be able to export this another application could be importing it.

I could think of an XMLish way of representing a language; s.th. like: 

<programm language="perl" filename="hello_world.pl">
<scope name="global">
<function-definition name="hello" args="none">
<text>
print "Hello world\n";
</text>
</function-definition>
<text>
hello();
</text>
</scope>
</programm>

[download]
(probably the tag text would better be named code but you know about PM's code-Tags ;-)

And then there would be some kind of stylesheet which could provide a description of how to show that programm-code.

Well, as I said, maybe I'm just plain stupid here and don't think very far, but still this strikes me as a good idea: let the language export their information so that the editor developers don't have to keep in pace... What do you think?

Regards... Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion

In reply to Parse Tree Export (as XML?) by stefan k

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