Sure, but now you've come full-circle: what is that high-level language going to look like, if not a traditional markup language? And if Hope is intended to be object code rather than source code, what's the point of making it a text format at all?
I'm not sure I agree with this premise either, the hierarchical structure seems inherently semantical to me, but the argument of the OP is it isn't the case.
> what's the point of making it a text format at all?
The text part is ASCII, so it make sense to represent it as such. The "presentation" part could be binary.
As for the text part, that is simple. I like to be able to manipulate text as text. There are many many tools to work with plain text. I can use regular expressions to search through text, get ranges of the result and apply an annotation to those ranges. You lose a lot of that in any other format.