# XAPL XML as a programming language --- As you might know, XML itself isn't a programming language, but rather a markup language - like markdown ( .md ). Well, I decided to implement basic features of programming languages like control flow, variables, functions, etc. into XML directly. My vision is that this might be used for visual programming languages, rather than actually manually coding in this language. ## Compilation v Interpretation There are basically two options for running programming languages. The first one is to compile the source code into an executable which is then ran by the operating system. The second and way easier approach is to "interpret" the source code, which means basically running it line by line. This however can be more tedious because in order to run the application, the user needs to have the interpreter installed on their machine, but it saves you the effort of writing a compiler. I decided to go with a compiled language, but instead of compiling to machine code, I'll compile to javascript. This is so that my language will have access to the gigantic collection of js libraries and modules, and also this allows developers to integrate their work into nodejs / npm.