Editing Extensible programming (section)

=== Content separated from form ===
Extensible programming systems should regard programs as data to be processed. Those programs should be completely devoid of any kind of formatting information. The visual display and editing of programs to users should be a translation function, supported by the extensible compiler, that translates the program data into forms more suitable for viewing or editing. Naturally, this should be a two-way translation. This is important because it must be possible to easily process extensible programs in a ''variety'' of ways. It is unacceptable for the only uses of source language input to be editing, viewing and translation to machine code. The arbitrary processing of programs is facilitated by de-coupling the source input from specifications of how it should be processed (formatted, stored, displayed, edited, etc.).