This sounds very interesting. Please keep the list posted.


Coincidentally, I have just read an interesting interview with Charles Simonyi (who worked with the Squeak Central people at PARC, afaik) about his work at Microsoft Research regarding "Intentional Programming". There seem to be aspects of this which overlap with what you are doing.

They represent "intentions" in a syntax-independent tree structure that can be generated from or translated into traditional programming languages.

The interesting thing about it is that you can work with these intentions on a new abstract level, thy claim.

Sounds intrigueing, but I have difficulties imagining how this would look in practice...

See http://research.microsoft.com/ip/ for details.

They say they are "moving from research to development" and are searching for programmers to produce a range of commercial tools for IP.

Some words from the web page:
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IP, one of the first projects started at Microsoft Research, set out on an ambitious goal to change program representation from the traditional text stream and syntax to a database (the "IP tree"), which is not about the program, but which represents the program itself. Step by step, IP demonstrated the viability and advantages of this idea:

     1. The costs of the representation are reasonable.

     2. Editing is not only possible but in many ways better than traditional text editing.

     3. Source control is superior to text, especially in domain specific contexts.

     4. Abstractions at every "level" from very low to very high can be directly represented.

     5. The functionality of an integrated development environment can be extended by dynamic link libraries.

     6. C preprocessor tricks can be automatically converted to more straightforward expressions of what was intended.

     7. An ecology of abstractions can be set up and coordinated by an "operating system" (called R5) for transformations so that independently developed abstractions can work together.

A number of these results have been patented.
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