Arjan,
  So sounds like we both ran in to the same issue of refactoring/code
manipulation with the problem of losing comments.
-Steve

On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 11:48 AM Arjan Scherpenisse <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Yes, sorry, a part of my talk at Elixirconf was about using the AST as the
> source for "intelligent" refactoring tools; renaming functions, inlining
> variables, extracting functions, etc.
> It should be online soon, I think, slides are here
> <https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15_xKuL_H4Eu-EkGarxVixCk192858avE1ef1gmcVKoc/edit?usp=sharing>
> .
>
> Arjan
>
> On Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 6:29:20 PM UTC+2, Steve Morin wrote:
>>
>> Arjan Scherpenisse
>> What is you're use-case?
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 4:20 AM Arjan Scherpenisse <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I actually discussed a solution like this with José in Prague but this
>>> will also become complicated very quickly, especially as these primivite
>>> nodes can be nested (e.g. keyword lists and normal lists). Maintaining the
>>> correct position in the parent is also problematic when you want to do
>>> something with the child nodes, for instance if you write an AST transform
>>> to swap 2 parameters of a function call, the comments would not get swapped.
>>>
>>> For the short term I've put this subject to rest. My opinion is that for
>>> tooling that depends on code -> ast -> code transforms, we need more
>>> specialized tooling. For instance, we cannot assume that the input source
>>> code is already properly formatted; Ideally a source code modification tool
>>> should work with all kinds of source code, and a transformation should only
>>> affect the local scope, and not, for instance, reformat all of the output.
>>> I could even imagine it working with code that is not syntactically
>>> correct. That is a subject that the Elixir parser was just not meant to do,
>>> and trying to squeeze comments into the AST would not solve this.
>>>
>>> I have been looking at the Wrangler
>>> <https://github.com/RefactoringTools/Wrangler/> source code, which is a
>>> set of Erlang refactoring tools, but I have not come very far yet. It is an
>>> interesting source of information though.
>>>
>>> Arjan
>>>
>>> On Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 12:18:07 PM UTC+2, [email protected] wrote:
>>>>
>>>> What about "hoisting" the comments into the metadata of the surrounding
>>>> block for the primitive AST nodes?
>>>> This means that we need to be able to specify *where* in a
>>>> `:__block__` a comment ought to occur, which shouldn't be a problem: The
>>>> only cases where this information will be out of date is when macro
>>>> rewriting alters the AST, which is a situation that would probably remove
>>>> the comments anyway.
>>>> (so e.g. a formatter would need to move comments with the code just as
>>>> is the case currently, but optimization tools would not care about comments
>>>> anyway).
>>>>
>>>> This 'where' might take the format of a keyword-list, with
>>>> half-line-numbers as keys and strings (containing the actual comments) as
>>>> values. 'half-line-numbers ' go from 0 up to and including
>>>> `2*n_lines_in_block`. Even numbers are comments occuring before (e.g. on
>>>> the line above) `div(half-line-number, 2)`. Odd numbers are comments
>>>> occuring after (at the end of the same line as) `div(half-line-number/2)`.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> So
>>>>
>>>> quote do
>>>>   # one is the lonliest number
>>>>   1
>>>>   2 # two is the smallest prime
>>>>   3
>>>>   # I am at the end
>>>> end
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> would compile to
>>>> {:__block__, [comments: [0 => "one is the lonliest number", 3 =>
>>>> "two is the smallest prime", 6 => "I am at the end"]], [1,2,3]}
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ~Marten / Qqwy
>>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Steve Morin | Hacker, Entrepreneur, Startup Advisor
>> twitter.com/SteveMorin | stevemorin.com
>> *Live the dream start a startup. Make the world ... a better place.*
>>
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-- 
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twitter.com/SteveMorin | stevemorin.com
*Live the dream start a startup. Make the world ... a better place.*

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