It's a higher-level construct. LSP and DAP are both used by Positron! But they're a pretty small subset of everything you actually want to do with a language. For example:

- discover all the interpreters on the system for the language (e.g. 'find me all the Pythons')

- start an interpreter session for the language

- run a fragment of code in the language and return the result

- get all the variables in the current interpreter session for the language

- view data defined in a particular variable

etc.

We generally try not to invent new protocols; in addition to LSP and DAP, we use Jupyter messages and kernels for most of the above. Positron only has custom protocols/APIs for the bits that are outside the purview of existing protocols.