The pure version of this idea has failed repeatedly for more than 50 years — noone ever writes their code in M-expressions :) A debased version of the idea fou

The pure version of this idea has failed repeatedly for more than 50 years — noone ever writes their code in M-expressions :) A debased version of the idea found success in Haskell, where the language syntax is defined as desugaring transformations towards a core calculus, but the internal representation is implementation-specific, and since the syntax was decided up front nobody got invested in writing code in a plain System F. A novel take on the idea is implemented wholeheartedly in Google's Go, where there's a utility based on the compiler called gofmt that reserializes the AST. They use it not only for style issues, but also to update the entire standard library to reflect syntax changes.