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I am really glad that the LDT project has been created.
Many of the posts to this newsgroup discuss ASTs and parsers, assuming
that a programming language's primary representation will always be its
textual form.
As far as I am concerned, I anticipate the day when the primary from of
a programming language is its AST, or even better, Abstract Syntax
Graph. Given the currently available computing power of the machines
used by developpers today, I think it is no luxury to start thinking of
replacing the traditional bunch of source files stored in a hierarchical
filesystem by a graph of objects backed by some database system.
There are a few obvious benefits to do so, even in the simple case of
Java-only developments:
- No more source code formatting hell and obnoxious merge conflicts
caused by formatting differences between developpers.
- Elimination of the parsing step from the compilation
I think the first thing LDT should provide is a new storage metaphor
based on ASTs (or ASGs). Of course, this representation issue does not
solve all the problems LDT proposes to deal with, but it would be a
great foundation for implementing new language support.