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Here is a thought.

Maybe no formatting characters should be allowed to be saved embedded in source code, and instead presentation filters should handle everything related to formatting, documentation, etc.

It might work..

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Git supports custom "clean/smudge" filters on push and pull exactly for this sort of things. Unfortunately neither github not gitlab consider them so your online diffs would look like a mess of you did that.

It looks interesting, but then one would have to define a normalization for the AST - either something like an XML printout of the AST, or a standard formatting for source code (perhaps whitespace-only minification?). It would also pose an issue when presenting code in "dumb" media (eg. a txt file).

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