> My main idea is to assign parse trees an important role, the compiler
> should take a parse tree, how that was contructed is non of its
> business. 

It already does. Look in the System-Compiler category. It's all there. But
hey, that's ok if your thesis advisor doesn't know it ;-o

> In short, syntax and semantics shuold be separated. Both will benefit.
> Semantics (for example the Squeak execution environment) will be
> available in more ways. And syntaxes can be used for more purposes.
> 
> I sincerely hope that at least some of the people on this list will take
> an interest in this line of development.
> 
> It will take some time before I am more acquainted with Squeak internals
> and have ported this material into it.
> 
> This will be my MSc thesis (never finished that), with your support it
> will be an enjoyable work and should lead to a nice and well documented
> structure on the syntax handling in Squeak.

Nice pitch, but when I was a lecturer I was always of the opinion that
students should do their assignments themselves, for their own sake ;-o ;-o

> Another important consideration of course is the SqC work in this
> direction. We will soon hear about this I hope.

Maybe this is the wrong place to bring this up, but I think that the
emphasis that is often put on syntax is generally misplaced. From a
cognitive point of view, syntax is really a very minor issue when it comes
to all things programming. There have been innumerable experiments on this
since the seventies, for example, but they have merely shown that there is
no great significance in the syntax as such.

If I were to make eg. Squeak more accessible to beginners, say, changing the
syntax would probably not list among the ten to twenty first items. Other
things would easily have much greater effect.

Very often the syntax is seen as the greatest obstacle in adopting a new
language. I remember this from the  Pascal-to-C debate in the 80's, we have
it with Lisp, etc etc. The syntax difference is surely the first one you
notice, but this is just a first-impressions issue in my opinion. As Yogi
Berra might have said, the surface is only skin-deep. The more important
issues are, indeed, deeper.

Henrik