I heard this, many years ago, when we used Perforce. The Perforce consultant that we dealt with, told us this, as an example of triggers. Back then, I was told that Google was a big Perforce shop (maybe just a part of Google. I dunno).
I have heard that this was one of the goals of developing IDLs. I think the vision was, that you could have a dozen different programmers, working in multiple languages (for example, C for the drivers, Haskell for the engine, and Lua for the UI). They would be converted to a common IDL, when submitted to configuration management, and then extracted from that, when the user looks at it.
I can't see that working, but a lot of stuff that I used to think was crazy, has happened, so, who knows?