Code formatting was solved in the 80s: Ada's DIANA IR stored no text sources at all
maxleiter · x · 2026-09-09
A year after publishing, developer Max Leiter doubles down: code formatting shouldn't need to exist. The essay stems from his high school CS teacher Mr. Paige, who worked on the Ada compiler since the early 80s.
- The old solution: the Rational R1000 workstation (a DoD Ada machine) never stored text sources — it stored an IR called DIANA.
- Projectional editing: both the compiler and the built-in IDE understood DIANA, so everyone could view code with their own pretty-printing settings; tabs-vs-spaces was meaningless, and the editor modified the program tree directly — known today as projectional editing.
- Context: the R1000 also shipped incremental compilation, semantic analysis, version control, and first-class debugging; Leiter contrasts this with teams still arguing over linter settings in 2025.
Core argument: the fix isn't a better formatter — it's not treating plain text as the only form of source code.
More from coding & agent
- Frigade launches Assist API to turn your existing agent into an in-product expert — ycombinator · 2026-09-09
- Ex-Vercel/Linear engineer open-sources design 'skills' for AI agents, 36.2k stars — tom_doerr · 2026-09-09
- Killer Muse use case: auto-browsing Facebook Marketplace without ban risk — alexandr_wang · 2026-09-09
- Ramp builds semantic layer linking AI agent spend to actual business ROI — floguo · 2026-09-09
- How senior AI engineers architect production agents around failure detection — MaryamMiradi · 2026-09-09
- CMU's new AI Agents course 11-768 posts all lecture videos for free — CharlotteHase · 2026-09-09