Warning: Insane Rambling
My biggest concern about rich text programming is that we would wind up with an untypable language, meaning that one can't touch type code anymore. Or worse, that one can only touch type on a proprietary keyboard. The last thing I want to do is have to stop my flow to grab the mouse, and click click click through menus to insert a symbol.
On the other hand, adding formatting to text can dramatically improve readability.
Tools like POD, JavaDoc and Doxygen are very interesting--and damn useful. I use Doxygen for my C code and POD for perl. I wouldn't go anywhere without them.
Just about every text editor offers some sort of automatic formatting capability--syntax coloring. Currently each editor has a parser and tries to understand code syntax. Why should every different editor have to implement its own C/C++/Perl/Java/Fortan/Ada/Lua/Befunge parser to provide syntax coloring and assorted services? I would like to see a set of standard hooks in compilers and interpreters, that would allow text editors request information about the code for syntax parsing, and who knows what else. Why can't we write a compiler that exposes an API that allows editors to request expert knowledge from the real expert--the compiler?
IMO, fortress is on the right track, but it will wind up trapping people and forcing use of their IDE. I think a rich text language compiler should be able to emit code "compiled" into xml/xhtml + stylesheets (or some other common, open format RTF or LaTex maybe) for display. That way J. Random Editor has a chance of displaying the code correctly. Of course you'll need to have a standard way to convert markup into plain text code. This probably has to be done by the compiler as well, unless we want to be stuck with "the one true editor" syndrome.
On the downside, adding all this junk to the compiler add a significant burden to its developers.
So after a long ramble, I guess I am saying that I would like to see common facilities for communication between editors and compilers before we start work on rich text languages. An editor that "knows for sure" what's going on with the code can be more aggressive about applying formatting changes. Once we have this ability, we can start to grow into the ability to offer wonky symbols and more control over presentation of code.
It's still early here, and I haven't had enough caffiene. I hope this makes some form of sense.
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