Comment by conartist6

For the last five years I've been working on this problem!

To solve it we need to be able to describe the structured content of a document without rendering it, and that means we need an embedding language for code documents.

I hope this doesn't sound overly technical: I'm just borrowing ideas from web browsers. I think of my project as being the creation of a DOM for code documents. The DOM serves a similar function. A semantic HTML documents has meaning independent of its rendered presentation and so it can be rendered many ways.

CSTML is my novel embedding language for code. You could think of it like a safe way to hold or serialize an arbitrary parse tree. Like HTML a CSTML document has "inner text" which this case is the source text if the program the parser saw. E.g. a tiny document might be `<Boolean> 'true' </>`. The parser injects node tags into the source text, creating what is essentially the perfect data stream to feed a syntax highlighter. To do the highlighting you print the string content if the document and use the control tags to decide on color. This is actually already how we syntax highlight the output from our own CLI as it happens. We use our streaming parser technology to parse our log output into a CSTML tag stream (in real time) and then we just swap out open and close node tags for ANSI escape codes, print the strings, and send that stream to stdout.

Here's a more complicated document generated from a real parse: https://gist.github.com/conartist6/412920886d52cb3f4fdcb90e3...