The parent might have been thinking of QuickBasic, which saved programs as byte-code, along with formatting information to turn it back into text: http://www.qb64.net/wiki/index.php/Tokenized_Code

VB6 projects were actually a textual format - even the widget layout: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa241723(v=vs.60).a...

As someone who runs a WYSIWYG app builder startup (https://anvil.works), I can attest that this is a Really Good Idea for debugging your IDE.

BBC Basic did this too -- keywords were stored as single bytes (using the 128-255 values unused by ASCII). Apart from that the program code wasn't compiled, it just was interpreted directly. Very smart design when everything had to fit in 32KB of RAM.