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Comment by luckystarr | Hacker News Reader

There has been a movement to try something like this under the buzzword "projectional editing". The idea was to edit a representation of the code and not the code itself. People and companies experimented with it but didn't get much adoption. Not sure why.

Perhaps you need to allow the developers to reach invalid states, because the editors I tried just refused entries which would result in a syntax violation. This is harder to implement though. :)

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Yeah, that's one of the main issues with ASTs and why I think they make the same mistake as text editors ultimately - designing around a particular data structure just constrains you into weird UX scenarios that don't have anything to do with the actual problem of making something that lets you write code.

Friend of mine said he worked with a system like that. Problem with it was it couldn't save code that didn't compile. That's a defect. Am reminded of someones comment that they would like a compiler that just stubs out code that doesn't compile. For a system to be workable you need to be able to handle that.

I feel that because no one uses AST aware editors no one understands what that would bring to the table. A counter example I've used CAD programs. And all of them store the design files as databases internally. Which means you can and people do preform database operations on them. Generate reports and perform update operations just like you would with an SQL type database.

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