The gist of it is that the extensible quasiquotation syntax design I've been working on for a while now, which I've thought had something to do with higher category theory, does indeed seem very related.

All the times I've thought to myself "Why is this so hard to implement? Surely someone out there has answers..." it turns out that the people working on opetopic higher categories are exactly the people with those answers. So now some of the complexity that's made me doubt my approach, I can actually be confident about, and I've found some clear answers out there to things I never quite figured out on my own.

For instance, check out "Implementing the Opetopes," a PDF linked from http://ericfinster.github.io/. In there, Eric Finster describes a data structure called "SAddr," which is an address referencing a particular part of an opetopic structure, the same way you might use an integer to reference a particular element of a list.

Every so often I would think about what it would take to reference a particular element of what I've been calling a "hypertee," and I would come to the tentative conclusion that I'd need a list of lists of lists ... of lists of empty lists. That's exactly what Eric Finster's SAddr data structure is, so it looks like I don't need to worry that I've made a mistake somewhere; someone else has tested this idea already and had success. :)

Over the past week I've been going ahead with an implementation of the kind of quasiquotation system I've been attempting for all this time. It's going well. :) I look forward to having more to report at some point.