Tunes lurker question : Does Tunes equal an "Intentional Programming" based Computing System with knobs?

[Lachlan Pitts]

Hi Tunesters,

	Sorry to take up bandwidth if it is a dumb question but I was wondering at
the plethora of terms used to define Tunes - even in its most succinct
description. (I must admit to a certain befuddlement over some terms - after
all I only just scraped through both my _Program Verification_ and
_Declarative Languages_ subjects at uni).  After re-reading through
Microsoft's Research documentation regarding Intentional Programming (IP), I
became interested in what looks to me like a huge step forward in software
implementation technologies.

My question is - the test-bed that is mentioned in the above document (while
obviously running on Windoze (IOMoveToBinNow) and C (ugh) at the moment)
seems to provide a useful tool for increasing the abstraction level of
programming while still maintaining (or even increasing) the flexibility of
implementation.  Is this not what Tunes' High Level Language (HLL) is about?

Could not Tunes per se be initially developed from an existent system such
as the one described?  Is Tunes being harmed by using a textual language
rather than an intentional tree structure such as the one described?

Could a system such as the one described be implemented [initially at least]
in something existent and not platform specific - ie. A web-based system
perhaps, with the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) [which - as the
documentation states can be viewed as a tree] as the common source package
language, for example?

Furthermore - wouldn't a system like that provide a much more flexible
test-bed for the areas of debate regarding semantics, operational and
optimization strategies?

	My apologies if the above questions are so stupid as to become flame-bait
it wasn't Intentional :)

Yours with curiosity,

Lachlan Pitts

PS: I am more than willing to give a fair amount of time to development of
any system based in such technologies if some consensus could be reached on
a plan of attack.