AST in JSON format

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Dec 7, 2009, at 7:22 AM, Kevin Curtis wrote:

> This covers the origin of the idea and some of it's uses:
> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2009-May/009234.html
>
> I'm interested in JsonML AST as a DSL target.
>
> Hacking the YACC file in jsc to parse the ES5 grammar as expressed in
> JsonML could yield an (executable) spec of sorts.

I can see how modifying the AST client-side prior to execution could  
be useful, to implement macro-like processing. But I don't see the use  
case for serializing an AST in JSON-like format, or sending it over  
the wire that way. It seems like it would be larger (and therefore  
slower to transmit), and likely no faster to parse, as compared to  
JavaScript source code. So shouldn't the serialization format just be  
JS source code?

Regards,
Maciej