I think this is the key question, and doing this will enable numerous interface improvements for people working with software (Eg: separation of content and pre

I think this is the key question, and doing this will enable numerous interface improvements for people working with software (Eg: separation of content and presents means that everybody can use their favorite view — three-space-tabs, extra-long lines, whatever). The challenge is that version control on text files (list of lines) is fairly straight forward and language agnostic, while OTOH the VCS would have to run after the language parser processes on the text file, and then be able to interface with the AST generated by the parser (for multiple languages). I presume this would become easy if different languages have the same parsing setup, or we have language/project-specific VCS tools. While the answers are not obvious (to me, at least) this definitely seems like the right direction to move in, instead of getting hung up on plain text and formatting issues.