I actually don't think that would be all bad if you in addition paired some parsers and serializers for other formats in your standard library.
That could actually be a really fun language: "you can write this in Haskell-syntax, Python-syntax, or C-syntax, we don't care, just make sure that you enclose it in the corresponding
<parse-as lang="c">
// ...
</parse-as>
and then `myprogram.c.x` will get compiled to `myprogram.x` which is a standard XML file, which you can then edit with `x-to-py myprogram.x >myprogram.py.x && vim myprogram.py.x` and have a field day of it."
Sort of like the PL equivalent of Lennon's Imagine.
It was moderately more complicated that this, as it represented the actual program tree structure within XML. Imagine lisp with XML tags in place of parentheses.
That could actually be a really fun language: "you can write this in Haskell-syntax, Python-syntax, or C-syntax, we don't care, just make sure that you enclose it in the corresponding
and then `myprogram.c.x` will get compiled to `myprogram.x` which is a standard XML file, which you can then edit with `x-to-py myprogram.x >myprogram.py.x && vim myprogram.py.x` and have a field day of it."Sort of like the PL equivalent of Lennon's Imagine.