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.
