Hi Eliot Thanks for the discussion. I will archive it and reread it. Now I think that historically they missed several points I learned while working on the Moose file format: - having doit or expressions to be executed instead of a declaration puts the burden on the tools. - for example not having a class definition declaration and just a do it forces the tools to parse and guess. - relying on sequence is not good because if you file is cut then this impacts several entities instead of having just one impacted. - I do not get why each entity in the chunk format is not self contained because in any case no decent programmer would use it to write code. - Mixing annotation and essential information makes the format really verbose. - what we see is that if we want to exchange on mail about code in several method in different classes, the chunk format is a pain vs. Point >> signature [ code here ] - This is not by accident that in all the books we wrote we use Clas >> signature code This way is not good because we do not have the warranty that code is not cut. Hence the previous one is better. I will restart one of these days to work on an alternate file format for textual editor. I do not like the GNUSt syntax. Now indeed how to store metadata is a good question. Stef