I don't mean to advocate visual programming. This is more a question of whether text is used to produce a model, or if the model is used to produce text. In any

I don't mean to advocate visual programming. This is more a question of whether text is used to produce a model, or if the model is used to produce text. In any case, it would enable a wide middle ground of languages that incorporate visual elements and richer interaction, while still being largely (or totally) text-based. Or just variation in text views: for instance, it would be pretty easy to just toggle using curly braces or white space depending on user preference. For interoperability, the program models could also be text, or there could be a canonical text view for particular languages (when you copy a program segment, it copies the corresponding text from the canonical view).