Re:A Good Idea (Score 1)

Exactly!

The lunkheads who keep thinking they will have to edit XML should get a clue. You can keep using the syntax you are familiar with if you want. On the other hand, all sorts of new features can be added as decorators once the program is represented internally as a tree structure (and stored as XML).

Read Knuth's "Literate Programming." Then imagine the feature built into your development environment, not part of a preprocessing chain.

Design your objects using UML and view them with UML or as your favorite conventional language. (This is currently available under the labels "forward-" and "reverse-engineering," but these are really different viewpoints of the same program, not separate files that have to be kept in sync somehow.)

Though it's been inactive for some time, you might want to look at the eXtenDE project on SourceForge, http://extende.sourceforge.net/