Detaching and Reconstructing the Documentary Structure of Source Code

Comments and white space in source code, ie. the documentary struc- ture of the source code should be preserved during program transformations if the produced source is for human consumption. However, program transformations are easier to be described if the documentary structure may be discarded. This paper presents a solution that the documentary structure is detached be- fore the transformations and it is re-attached after the tra nsformations. The de- tached information is stored in three layers: token formatt ings, comments and layout, which we call layered representation. This representation is also suitable for analysing and refactoring the documentary structure of the source code. This model is worked out for the F# programming language, and it has been imple- mented in F# too. The proposed approach can be adapted to other programming languages.