Declaration syntax

[Tobias Pankrath]

On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 10:13:57 UTC, Boyd wrote
> I agree that you wouldn't want code to be precisely constraint 
> to what's syntactically correct. Function bodies in particular 
> benefit quite a bit from just manually typing text. But a tree 
> structure of all modules, classes, functions, properties, 
> etc..., would go a long way.

See for example 
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/papers/trondheim86/usefulness-syntax-directed-editors-19860616-18.pdf

This paper states that a structured editor indeed offers 
benefits, however they concede that they do not come from tree 
operation on source (tree cut and paste etc.) but from 
refactoring* tools that benefit from the tree structure.

However as many modern IDEs prove it does not matter (for 
refactoring) whether you pretty print (serialize) the source code 
for the user or parse (deserialize) it into a tree for the 
refactoring tools.