About a year ago, when I worked for an insurance company, a friend of mine was writing an XML app that would take an XML document and automatically convert it into the programming language of choice. At the time I left, he had basic DTDs for VBA and Perl. He couldn't write anything horribly complex, but he was getting interesting results. I found the idea very interesting because if someone requests a particular application coded as an XML document, the server would determine what languages they could use and automatically parse the document into the correct language. Rather than store copies of every program in every language the system needed, it only needed one copy. Nifty, huh?

The drawback is pretty obvious: nothing complex is going to be churned out of that system. Forget about regular expressions (try writing /"((?:[^?"]|\?(?!"))*)\?"/ in VB sometime). Hashes were probably out the window. In other words, anything that's "language specific" just isn't going to fly. I wish I knew what became of that project. Hmm... time to send some e-mail.

Cheers,
Ovid

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