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bingo.

In my mind, a program is something that accepts input, does some processing on that input, and produces output. To me, the "programming" should revolve around the processing, rather than around the internal representation of the input, intermediate data, or output.

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This is a fair point, but internal representation of the input can create drastic differences in how it's processed. Try writing an interpreter without tokenizing and parsing the text into some kind of AST. While this could be described as process, I think it proves that the internal representation of data matters.

No argument here - not arguing against data structures, or standards for manipulating them. Mostly saying I prefer "Programs that operate on ASTs" than "ASTs have methods to operate on themselves."

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