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2. LISP is a great example. It is the first example that people present. Ashame that LISP has such terrible syntax. Wouldn't it be nice to have an editor that displays code at a higher level, but the low level language is like LISP. Putting code in a different form allows that. I'm looking at doing a language in Argot ( http://www.einet.com.au/ ) which is binary. It will probably act a lot like LISP but will look like a format that the user is comfortable.

3. I disagree. Grammars and parsers are a pain to write. And grammars are especially hard to develop and get right. A format which is closer to AST is easier to parse. If we're going to get rid of this tower of babel we've developed for ourselves, we need to develop more flexible formats to describe code.

I'm currently attempting to design a lisp style language which has a binary grammar using Argot ( http://www.einet.com.au/ ) which is extensible like XML, but binary. It also uses a dictionary style schema system which allows schemas to be mixed more easily than XML which is great for this type of language design. The language is still at pencil and paper stage, but should be interesting when done. Infact the hardest part is not the language or runtime environment. The hardest part is designing an editor which makes the user feel comfortable editing the AST directly.

I disagree completely. The problem is that text is a terrible abstraction layer for programming languages. The amount of effort that goes into making a grammar work for a language as text is huge. Often many compromises are made to ensure the grammar can work.

While I don't like XML, I am using Argot( http://www.einet.com.au/ to do something similar. Argot is binary and allows much more expresiveness than any text based language will give. Its also extensible like XML, so for a language new concepts can be added as needed. It will also allow data and code concepts to be mixed easier.

Of course this requires an editor which will be a challenge to get right. But thankfully projects like eclipse make this easier and easier. Even today eclipse plugins understand the concepts of java. Its not really that big a jump to change the format of the file and start doing more interesting things with a language.

The language I'm develolping is currently looking like a "scripting" language built on java with many lisp type concepts. The nice thing about Argot is that I can add new concepts into the language dictionary whenever I want.

In the future I hope to develop a browser that allows mixing data and code seamlessly. The Argot dictionary concept allows this to happen easily. The fact Argot is binary also makes it compact.

Even further into the future it would be nice to see virtual machines with dynamic byte code. I've got ideas of using Argot for this too, but that can wait. :)

In the end binary XML is nothing like XML any longer. An alternative to binary XML is Argot. It has a binary language for describing binary data in the same way XML Schema describes XML. The resulting parser is also simpler. The description language is even able to describe itself. http://www.einet.com.au/

There's an alternative to binary XML which treats the descriptions of each type in the document like any code. In effect it creates small code segments to read the data. Check out http://www.einet.com.au/

One format being developed called Argot goes further than XML. It is binary, but works using a dictionary approach to data definitions. This means you can mix diferent schemas easily. Look at http://www.einet.com.au/ for more info