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From: Adam Jensen <hanzer@riseup.net>
Newsgroups: comp.programming,comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: [BBC] Programmers who use spaces 'paid more'
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2017 18:36:24 -0000 (UTC)
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On Wed, 21 Jun 2017 18:48:22 +0200, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:

[snip]
> Which leads me to the conclusion that the origin of a lot of problems is
> the fact that we save "source" files that are used as-is both for human
> presentation/edition and for machine processing (compiling).  I would
> propose the alternative to save the programs eg. in the form of an
> abstract syntactic tree (let's say lisp S-expressions), and each time it
> is loaded in an IDE/editor, it would be unparsed into the specific
> syntactic and layout/indenting preferences of the programmer; and when
> saved, the programmer specific syntax would be parsed, and the
> S-expression syntactic tree would be saved to the file.  Machine
> processing can use directly these S-expression forms.

That's interesting. I am also surprised that the representation of 
"programming languages" and "source code" documents haven't really 
changed much. For example, it seems like a system of XML-based documents 
could represent the essential "program", the documentation, and the 
dependencies, with all of the various layers and dimensions of annotation 
such that various aspects and views could be presented to humans 
(engineers, students, etc.) and automata (compilers, analyzers, etc.). I 
think standards and test-suites, procedures and work-flows, definitions 
and descriptions, examples and explanations, could/should all be 
represented along with the tools and programs in this system of documents 
that would represent a coherent information system.