How abstract should the AST be?

Allen pointed me to this: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/02/11.html, From AST to Lossless Syntax Tree.

I thought I’d reply on the list.

The standard way to look at this is that you have a parser and generator function:

p : string -> ast
g : ast -> string

I don’t think requiring the AST to be lossless in the sense that g is an inverse of p is a useful property. Instead, p is many to one and the AST is a kind of canonical form.

We do want the composition

g.p = lambda x. g(p(x)))

to be idemopotent, which we get if the AST really is

p(s) = p(g(p(s))

Stan’s AST has enough info in it that you could use it to write a generator for a Stan program. Say, something like a pretty printer.

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