I thought I would clarify a couple things about my last entry. I apparently got so excited about the ramifications of an expandable syntax, that I didn't take the time to clearly define the programmer's view of this language.

All programming in an XML-based language would need to happen from within a IDE. That IDE would parse the XML and translate it to a more human readable format. Text like this:

Would be seen by the programmer as this:

public class MyClass {
  public String toString() {
      return "Hello World";
  }
}

For that matter, the same IDE might have multiple syntaxes for the same XML:

DEFINE CLASS: MyClass {
 FUNCTION: toString()
 END FUNCTION "Hello World"
}

Of course, the syntax would need to be within the same general family. You couldn't render a C based language as LISP or anything. Hell, I don't even know why you would want multiple syntaxes for the same language. My point is, the programmer wouldn't be reading XML.

I was also going to talk about an idea that involved wrapping a current language with an XML based language, but I realized that would only provide the component embedding features of an XML based language. You couldn't have an XML based meta-language if you were pre-compiling the XML into another language. Oh, well.