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Thank you for detailed explanations.

Some of this issues could be resolved while staying within plain text, well to some extent at least. There're various attempts to encode metadata into plain text source code. Loading partially incorrect code should be possible, that's what many IDEs do successfully.

Plain text is the most portable data format ever invented, any incentive to replace it should have very convincing benefits.

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Loading partially incorrect would mean that the invariants are not, in fact, invariants.

Encoding the metadata in the text would lose the benefit of using text. At that point you may as well store the code as XML or indeed as we do, in a key value store.

We could layer our data on top of text but this would lose the algorithmic benefits of a good data structure, and wouldn't actually be editable reasonably with a simple text editor.

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