Born-digital heritage initiatives increasingly preserve software as cultural artefacts, yet the textual status of source code itself remains comparatively underexplored. This poster proposes a deliberately provocative, TEI-centered experiment: what happens if computer code is encoded not merely as functional notation, but as a literary and line-based textual form comparable to verse?

The approach focuses on early home-computer listings, especially from languages such as BASIC, whose syntax was explicitly designed to resemble natural language. Especially in these sources, but also in other programming languages, code is not only executable instruction, but also a material writing practice: visually arranged (through indentation and lineation), rhythmically structured (through loops and iterations), stylistically distinctive (particularly when deviating from normative coding conventions), and often strongly associated with individual authorship. Like poetry, code is usually processed line by line; lineation structures interpretation, pacing, hierarchy, and semantic grouping.

Against this background, the poster explores several experimental directions within the TEI. The central question is whether source code, when understood as authored and lineated text, can be represented through structures traditionally associated with verse. Possible approaches include the repurposing, conceptual broadening, or even renaming of elements such as <l> and <lg>.

At the same time, the poster explicitly addresses objections to this approach: the danger of collapsing distinctions between functional and aesthetic texts, violating established TEI semantics, or obscuring computational structures already represented through parsers and formal grammars. Rather than advocating an immediate standardization effort, the poster presents these encodings as experimental interventions intended to test the conceptual boundaries of TEI itself.

Ultimately, the poster asks a broader methodological question relevant to textual scholarship and digital philology alike: is verse defined by aesthetics, by material layout, or by structural segmentation? And what happens to TEI semantics when executable code is treated as authored, lineated text?

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