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Two points: 1. Breaking at specific points is something that can be specified by the pretty-printer of the _viewer_ you are using. Think of existing auto-form

Two points: 1. Breaking at specific points is something that can be specified by the pretty-printer of the _viewer_ you are using. Think of existing auto-formatters and imagine that they're working over the view instead of the persisted form. 2. The AST can have pointers into advisory data (or the other way around, if desired, the "program data" can include the AST, but also other things as well) to note that there is an anonymous region here (C# and friends already have conventions for this _for the source code_ that Visual Studios understands - look at `#region` comments). This would let viewers choose their preferred representation for a region.

arp242 2y ago
You can't specify it in the viewer, because it won't know where to break. How does it know that x, y, width, and height are semantically grouped and best put on the same line? It doesn't. Auto-formatters can't format this. Or rather: they can only format it in dumb ways. And including tons of extra info in the AST means you've just got the same as a text file, but in a more awkward and obfuscated format. Also what you want can already be done right now. Converting your source code to AST and then formatting it how you want is already easy to do. But your coworkers will hate you, because you will lose all these small details that are actually quite significant. And there is no way to get them back once they're lost, so your coworkers all using some formatting tool is not going to help.
- svieira 2y ago
  You're thinking about the AST as the-AST-for-LanguageX not the-AST-for-LanguageX-withAdvice. Including an AST node called `Region` or a decoration for "Region" that multiple AST nodes can point to (or vice-versa a list-of-region indicies pointing into the AST tree) _that is serialized and stored in the same kind of way that #region is for C# code_ would allow for multiple people to look at the code structured in the correct way while displaying that structure in different ways (color coding vs. block outlining vs. extra newlines vs ... you get the idea).

arp242 2y ago

You can't specify it in the viewer, because it won't know where to break. How does it know that x, y, width, and height are semantically grouped and best put on the same line? It doesn't. Auto-formatters can't format this. Or rather: they can only format it in dumb ways. And including tons of extra info in the AST means you've just got the same as a text file, but in a more awkward and obfuscated format. Also what you want can already be done right now. Converting your source code to AST and then formatting it how you want is already easy to do. But your coworkers will hate you, because you will lose all these small details that are actually quite significant. And there is no way to get them back once they're lost, so your coworkers all using some formatting tool is not going to help.

svieira 2y ago
You're thinking about the AST as the-AST-for-LanguageX not the-AST-for-LanguageX-withAdvice. Including an AST node called `Region` or a decoration for "Region" that multiple AST nodes can point to (or vice-versa a list-of-region indicies pointing into the AST tree) _that is serialized and stored in the same kind of way that #region is for C# code_ would allow for multiple people to look at the code structured in the correct way while displaying that structure in different ways (color coding vs. block outlining vs. extra newlines vs ... you get the idea).