That's a very old idea that never really worked. There are two main objections against that concept: * Any tree structure would be highly language-specific. Yo

That's a very old idea that never really worked. There are two main objections against that concept: * Any tree structure would be highly language-specific. Your VCS wouldn't support experimental or new or propietary languages. Even worse, for most real languages, operations like refactoring require not a concrete or simple abstract syntax tree but some transformed or enriched (e.g., with type information) variant that is highly specific to the tool that performs the operation (think Eclipse internal tree structures). Language servers might help here, but they're far from the only implementation. * In practice, if I have a textual diff and a tool that can generate the required tree, I can always apply that tool to the textual representation, just paying a little bit of compute. Compute is cheap.