AST vs CST

[jayvdb]

It is hard to auto-fix code if you only have an AST. Vital information has been dropped.
Also many of the generic bears rely on information typically not present in an AST.

Do you actually want a universal CST also?

[sils]

I haven't thought about all this in detail, my idea was to have the AST while keeping the information which part belongs where in the source code so we could reorder the statements. I'm not fully aware about the difference between AST and CST though. Apparently people at our university don't think a master student in computer science should know that :P

[sils]

(First step and most important is analysis, auto fix is more of a very very super cool gimmick after I think.)

[Makman2]

I think we should focus on ASTs as they are a bit easier. Though what we could do already is assigning each AST element the according code-string. Like

// inside a C file:
return a + 2;

-->

Return, range=(0, 13), text='return a + 2;'
 - Add, range=(7, 12), text='a + 2'
   - Variable, name = 'a', range=(7,8), text='a'
   - Constant, value = '2', range=(11, 12), text = '2'

then we are not discarding additional information. We just don't parse it :)

[Makman2]

so agreeing with @sils1297 :)