In my example docs/articles/bar.txt and docs/important/baz.txt refers to exactly the same file. For instance, the same file can be accessed through different file paths. The name of a file and its path is independent of its inode number. Of course, in a real system, the inode numbers would be much bigger. In my illustration above they are the numbers 210, 211, …, 214.

In Unix, every file and directory is uniquely identified with an inode number. I write more about the implications of such a choice in modern Smalltalk in the following article:Ĭomparison of location addressed and content addressed objects

For instance, the Smalltalk programming language which dates back to the 1970s eschews file-based development as well. The reason was specifically because I wanted to find out what non-file-based programming is like in 2023. So, why did I do that, and what was my experience? Yet for the last week I deliberately went ahead to learn Unison, despite not being particularly interested in it. I am actually not particularly interested in that kind of language, being primarily a big fan of dynamically typed languages such as Julia and Lua. It is a pure statically typed programming language which might look familiar to anyone who has ever toyed with Haskell or another ML-like language such as OCaml, Standard ML or F#. The particular programming language I have used, that chooses to store code in its compiled form, is called Unison.

Depending on the language, this AST is also what is used to execute statements in the program or to produce the machine code that will get executed. A function definition or a type definition will get parsed and turned into an AST.

An abstract syntax tree (AST) representing an assignment statement.Īnything in source code can be represented as an AST.

Code writing