The way I think about it is that rlworkbench should be a text editor that is aware of the language of the text that is being edited. That awareness can give you syntax highlighting for example. But it can also give you more if it knows more about the language. For example, there might be an editor operation to expand the selection. If the cursor is inside a function, expanding the selection might select the whole function. Because the editor is aware of the language, it knows where the function starts and ends. Furthermore, defining the languages that rlworkbench knows about should be easy. And the norm should be to create many small domain specific languages. And when you define a language, it not only gives you editor support, but you can also define how that language should be compiled or translated.