I am experimenting with tag based (_str, _dba, etc) code visibility grep macros - in the context of pattern centric code domains. As such I am writing some fairly large custom menus in the SE macro language.
Code domains such as database, GUI, state machines, asynchronous programming, networking and component frameworks - can have 12 to 20 patterns per code domain - each of which is stratified using some paradigm or model.
The result is custom menus that are non-trivial in cardinality (ie; > 100 to 1000 menu items per individual menu).
There are ways to second stage menus - where a menu item pops another 'second stage' menu (to overcome the current SE menu size limit - and to reduce the size of any given custom SE menu). This, however, defeats the purpose of expressing programming knowledge in a simple KISS pragmatic approach - of using a hierarchy to categorize code artifact knowledge - resident in code domain and software pattern knowledge (expressed in software language independent - code artifact tag lexicons).
It would be much faster (with cardinality > 1000 menu items) - to have an XML based - round trip engineering -
menu generator (or a standalone SE macro code generator) - that can take a SE custom menu design - articulated in an XML file - and generate an SE macro module (*.e) - which can be loaded in the present SE custom menu design framework.
For round trip engineering - it would also be nice to generate an XML SE Menu definition - based on an existing SE menu.
The (1.a) generation and (1.b) load of SE Menu Xmodules (in XML format) - and the (2.a) generation and (2.b) load of SE Menu SEmodules (native SE code) - would give Slickedit users the ability to automate software programming operations (like tag based grep operations) - that require a large cardinality of very small functions - written in the SE language.
More important - it would give the SE user community - a way to share programming automation modules - designed to customize SE to perform - software engineering operations on a target code base (ie; refactoring, software metric generation, and code exploration functionality, etc.).
