I don't know whether that's an "aside" comment, but it's interesting and informative anyway!
Another variant of the idea that I was mulling over was to base a roughly NestedText level of abstraction on UTF-8 transparent characters, and then combine that with what Animats was talking about as a standardized GUI for trees, dictionaries etc.
A recent trend is that programming languages have more than one bijectively equivalent syntax. For example, ReasonML [0] and OCaml are two bijectively text based syntaxes. That idea could be extended to a NestedText like syntax being bijectively equivalent to a text based syntax. Editors like Visual Studio Code infer that sort of information continually on the fly, but it sort of gets lost in the toolchain. Compilers could operate at a higher-level of abstraction than lexing/scanning. Git merge might also work better if could operate at a NestedText like level of abstraction.
Another variant of the idea that I was mulling over was to base a roughly NestedText level of abstraction on UTF-8 transparent characters, and then combine that with what Animats was talking about as a standardized GUI for trees, dictionaries etc.
A recent trend is that programming languages have more than one bijectively equivalent syntax. For example, ReasonML [0] and OCaml are two bijectively text based syntaxes. That idea could be extended to a NestedText like syntax being bijectively equivalent to a text based syntax. Editors like Visual Studio Code infer that sort of information continually on the fly, but it sort of gets lost in the toolchain. Compilers could operate at a higher-level of abstraction than lexing/scanning. Git merge might also work better if could operate at a NestedText like level of abstraction.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(syntax_extension_for_O...