[email protected] wrote: > On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 3:10 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood > <[email protected]> wrote: >> ... programmers of AST-processing applications will see this >> serialization when debugging, and it is likely to appear in test >> cases for such applications and for parsers/emitters. > > Also: would a JsonML representation be *quicker* to execute than the > original human readable JS source? If so, it could be useful as a wire > format for the code of mobile objects.
Parsing ECMAScript correctly is hairy, complicated, and likely to be inefficient unless you have a lot of time to spare to optimize the parser (as I'm sure you know from Caja :-). Parsing a JsonML serialized AST is trivial: use JSON.parse. OTOH, if we standardize an AST format, then presumably we'll be adding a source->AST API function that uses the implementation's existing parser. If and when such an API is available, there would be little reason to use the JsonML serialization as a wire format. > Furthermore, this format could be a good target for *generated* code. The in-memory AST, yes. Also possibly the serialized form where the code generator is written in a language other than ECMAScript (since writing a correct JSON emitter, even if you can't reuse one, is *much* easier than writing a correct ECMAScript emitter). > On the other hand, this discussion slowly creeps into asking whether > (say) collaborative IDEs and could benefit from such a common > representation. For that use case, it would be necessary to support > comments, which would grow the problem space considerably.... It depends whether you just want to preserve comments, which is pretty easy and would be quite a useful *option* (especially for "doc-comments"), or whether you want to preserve whitespace, which I think should be considered out-of-scope for an AST format. -- David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥ http://davidsarah.livejournal.com
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