There are some cases where formatters like Prettier don't have one canonical representation for an AST, in particular behavior around line breaks (multiple empt

There are some cases where formatters like Prettier don't have one canonical representation for an AST, in particular behavior around line breaks (multiple empty lines are allowed, a line break after an "{" opening brace in an object literal will force it to span multiple lines, etc) But yeah, otherwise everyone could just have their own preferred formatter/settings and we could commit whatever representation is most optimal for diffing to version control (e.x. multi-line object literals, trailing commas in arrays/args, etc). You could use something more compact like a binary AST but for compatibility with "legacy" tools that deal with text I think it would be better to use a more verbose text-based representation.