You can't easily search / grep etc. an IR, unless you use some kind of reverse translator. Readable source files have their benefits in being simple in that sense.
You don't need a special grep for every language, you just need a tool that translates the mini version into the formatted version and back. Then you chain the tools, just like anything else in UNIX.
Seems reasonable. Since you're likely to perform this translation more than once for any given file, it seems like it would be practical to cache the translated output, perhaps as a file on disk.
The tools didn't require an infinite amount of time to write, why would it take infinity to change a format???
(but no not all the tools, just all the ones that are used)
