I frequently need to jump between various programming / scripting languages and have often wondered if there’s a site out there that helps with this process by mapping the equivalent functions in the various languages.

I’m yet to find such a site and have recently wondered about the feasibility of a microformat for marking up programming language reference pages. I first thought about this while viewing the reference page for processing (screen shot below).

Would it be possible to mark up similar reference pages for other scripting languages like php, ruby, javascript, actionscript and python using a standardised set of class names and markup structure for the methods and functions that are common throughout each language?

I put this question to the microformats google group and Ilya Radchenko made the point that the scale and depth of languages like php would make this extremely difficult. But such an effort would not need to cover the idiosyncrasies at the dark edges of each of these languages. To be useful it need only map the common core, most often used functions like those dealing with strings, text, arrays and the more common math methods.

I’m sure that a consistent, standard and semantic markup format for scripting language reference pages and the resulting consistency in presentation would be a huge help to developers. As the microformat motto goes, “designed for humans first, machines second”, I wonder what the benefits of having this data machine readable would be?