Plain Text Source Code
Richard Tallent wants something like OLE compound documents for source code.
Hey, if you can put a table or a picture in a Word file, why can't you have one source code document that natively (i.e., not between "") contains VB.NET; C#; spell-checked resource strings; regex patterns; images and other binary resources; form designs; XHTML; XML scraps of any type; unescaped, prettyfied SQL; ASP.NET controls; etc.?On the Lisp/Smalltalk side of my aggregator, I've seen discussion of whether this is a good thing; apparently some Lisps and Smalltalks use a non-text file format for source code. I know that DrScheme still does this, though it will work with plain text Scheme source as well. For example, here's a screen shot of defining an "XML box" in the editor. DrScheme is actually a cool development environment in a lot of ways.
