Remove redundant raw properties

[mathiasbynens]

Here’s the current AST for [a-z]:

{
    "type": "characterClass",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "characterClassRange",
            "min": {
                "type": "value",
                "kind": "symbol",
                "codePoint": 97,
                "range": [
                    1,
                    2
                ],
                "raw": "a"
            },
            "max": {
                "type": "value",
                "kind": "symbol",
                "codePoint": 122,
                "range": [
                    3,
                    4
                ],
                "raw": "z"
            },
            "range": [
                1,
                4
            ],
            "raw": "a-z"
        }
    ],
    "negative": false,
    "range": [
        0,
        5
    ],
    "raw": "[a-z]"
}

All the raw properties here can be removed except "raw": "a" and "raw": "z". Should they be removed?

[mathiasbynens]

I strongly feel like they should be removed. It doesn’t make sense to duplicate data like this: this only makes it harder to modify the AST (as you now have to perform the modification in several places).

[jviereck]

I see where you are going. I think there are multiple answers to this:

1. let's assume we have a new flag verbose: true/false for the parser. In the case verbose=false, I think there should be no raw entries at all on the AST. In this case, modifying the AST is easy. In such a mode, I would also leave out the "kind": "symbol" property.
2. store the minimal information to recover the original. For this, removing most of the raw properties as proposed by you seems to be the right thing todo
3. make it easier to debug the AST. In this case, having the current version of raw property on every AST entry seems the optimal solution

@mathiasbynens, as you want to modify the AST, is 1. the solution you seek for?

[mathiasbynens]

1 sounds good to me. (2 would be fine, too.)