[XML-SIG] Re: XML DTD for Python source?

[THOMAS PASSIN]

<snip/>

> So, once again: I'm interested in exploring what would happen if we
> (programmers) used the same structured, extensible representation that
> other people are moving toward, rather than building lots of pre- and
> post-processing engines to handle less uniform (and certainly less
> extensible) structured representations of our own.  If anyone has already
> done this, I'd be grateful for pointers.
>
Well, for one thing it would make it easier to make a "folding" editor.  If
you haven't sampled one yet, try FTE or one of the demos in wxWindows (or,
better,  its Python version wxPython - alldunn.com/wxPython).  A folding
editor can collapse or expand text blocks, something like an outliner, so
you can hide detail you may not want to see at the moment.  It should be
possible to do this more intelligently if you understand the structure of
your document than if you don't.

Still, once you start creating your program this way, it's going to be
bloody hard to to edit it by hand any more.  You'd be locked into using the
one or two enviroments that support your special format.  Maybe that's OK if
they could export to text format.

Tom Passin