> This means you need to change out several decades of line-oriented manipulation tools in favor of new ones that are AST-based
I wonder if a generic binary->text tool/library could solve this. Grep could check the file mime type then call the tool to convert from the binary format to the text format if available. I could see this being useful for a lot of binary formats.
where opening and modifying "module-1.txt" would cause "module-1.ast" to be updated, and vice-versa. I actually think I've seen this approach used in some experimental language or another. I'm sure there would be a LOT of tricky edge cases and/or synchronization bugs to address, but it seems like it's not very far outside the realm of feasibility.
I wonder if a generic binary->text tool/library could solve this. Grep could check the file mime type then call the tool to convert from the binary format to the text format if available. I could see this being useful for a lot of binary formats.