[shalabhc]

Instead of retrofitting a structured format on top of the current text centric world, can we imagine if a structure centric world would be better? A large number of tools would exist to operate semantically on the same structured format, including editors, versioning systems, grep, etc. Diffs and merges would work better. Languages would define the syntax in terms of a tree input instead of text input, and so on.

[icebraining]

We could, I'm just not convinced it would actually be better than text. Parsing is not a difficult problem.

[shalabhc]

It's not about parsing being difficult or easy (e.g. you would still have to parse an abstract structure into a syntax tree specific to your language semantics). It's about making a structured form be the canonical baseline (instead of the canonical being a 'sequence of lines' i.e. text).

Consider that every programming language and every config language first invents a new syntax to encode a tree like structure (typically using a combination of curly braces, other brackets, keywords, indentation etc.) but the code itself is saved as 'text'. This is a lossy encoding - all a generic reader such as `git` or `grep` can now infer is that the file contains a 'sequence of lines' and can then only offer line based operations (git diffs are line based, grep searches are line based, etc.), when in fact a more meaningful operation would be the tree structure based.

If a tree based format was the canonical baseline, diffs could display the location of the node added (e.g. 'Added <Class X> -> <Function Y>'), without having language specific parsing knowledge. Similarly, most editors could provide 'tree view' and 'jump-next', 'jump-up' etc based on context, again without knowing language specific details. Further, many internal representations of programs (e.g. intermediate representations in compilers) also use trees, and could potentially be exported into one of these forms, to make the plethora of tools work with them.

(BTW, I'm not saying a tree is the best generic structure to replace text, but just using it as an example to argue for advantages of a generalized extensible structure over plain text.)

[sitkack]

Given the number of security vulns that boil down to broken parsing, I don't think this is true. Maybe it isn't difficult _for you_. It is still a difficult problem. By moving to structured editors, many more dimensions of data can be encoded into a program than can be cleanly represented by text.

Why do you argue so vehemently against someone perusing an avenue of research?