I don't care too much about the character set, but I do want additional structure semantics - namely trees. As it is, parsing is ugly because we'll write 1D te

I don't care too much about the character set, but I do want additional structure semantics - namely trees. As it is, parsing is ugly because we'll write 1D text visualized as a 2D projection; then we use parse rules to blow it out into a tree so that your (parens and {braces}) can work properly; and then (if writing a compiler rather than an AST-walking interpreter) we collapse it again into a 1D executable format after one or more rounds of semantic analysis. It's a lot of steps, and there's plenty of room for error. It offends my minimalistic sensibilities. What would the alternative be, though? It's nice to be able to just type out code, and to copy+paste the data from other formats like HTML documents. So in the end you still want to have an editor that can deal with plain text, even if it is "natively" aware of the AST rules of the language. My other alternative is to write more assembler or Forth-style languages that don't have to be parsed as a tree. Not what most people would want...