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

[gvwilson@nevex.com]

> Paul Prescod wrote:
>
> Python is no more "flat" than XML. XML's tree happens to be very
> well-hyped.
> 
> I will go this far: Python could use better ways of attaching
> structured content to methods, classes and other declared objects. It
> seems that structured docstrings will be the mechanism. As long as
> there is a single structured docstring syntax (or at least
> meta-syntax) I think that that solution is reasonable but you are
> right that in a perfect world Python would have anticipated structured
> annotations in the beginning (does any language??).

Greg Wilson writes:

I'm not actually asking for any changes in Python's syntax (or Scheme's,
or C's, or...). I'm asking for a change in the way program source is
stored on a disk.  I earnestly hope that the XML tags in the program
source aren't visible, any more than they would be with any other decent
WYSIWYG environment.

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.

Thanks,
Greg