Hacker News Reader

For structural code editors to thrive, what is needed is a universal, simple, minimal, txt-like format for the AST, so that AST-editors are not locked to a single programming language each.

View on HN

What requires the format to be text-like? I'm not sure I agree with this assertion. I think structural editors need to be language specific so that they can offer higher value edits that might only make sense for specific languages.

"Text-like" meaning easy to parse and universally understood. With language-specific (or indeed, all) AST/generic tree attributes serialized in a uniform way that does not entirely break parsing if an editor does not understand one of them. I.e. I can edit code even if my editor doesn't understand the language and doesn't give me syntax highlighting and completion. More, that that 'understanding' can be factored out of the editor core, as is done with language servers today.

You might enjoy reading up on EYG and/or listening to podcast appearances of the creator…

Indeed. Here's a link to one episode https://pod.link/developer-voices/episode/e47720e8c6dc3d1660...

Do you mean:

https://eyg.run/

Is this typo on the web page or in the language?

>type missmatch given: Integer expected: String

or is this an intentional phrasing to match the following text?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com