I talked to Doug Engelbart about support of distributed (open) code development. I had recorded a few extant web tools to study code. (LXR & JavaDoc). I keep forgetting and Doug keeps reminding me that an important attribute of Augment is that one edits in his own preferred view-spec. View-specs are for more than mere flexibility in seeing the structure.

The current web tools are definitely for look only—don’t touch. Wiki is a semi exception but falls far short in that

An idea emerged as we talked that I want to record here.

Java, C and C++ use curly braces and semi-colons in the following pattern:

{blobA; blobB; blobC;}
The pattern is used to separate statements of a block, elements of a class and perhaps other constructs. The idea is to make the depicted construct into an Augment branch with each blob a sub-branch. The curly brackets would not appear in any of the Augment statements.

Perhaps a new view-spec would show such an Augment branch with curly brackets so as to please the eye of the programmer accustomed to those images. I want the compiler to see the same hierarchical structure as Augment displays so that the user need not expand each statement to verify that the curly brackets therein are indeed matched!