> Back when he was working on Ada, they didn't store text sources at all — they used an IR called DIANA. Everyone had their own pretty-printing settings for viewing it however they wanted.

I’m still confused because the specifically call the IR DIANA, and they talk about viewing the IR. It isn’t clear to me if the IR is more like a bytecode or something, or more like just the original source code with a little processing done to it. They also have a quote,

> Grady Booch summarizes it well: R1000 was effectively a DIANA machine. We didn't store source code: source code was simply a pretty-printing of the DIANA tree.

So maybe the other visualizations they could do by transforming the IR were so nice that nobody even cared to look at the original ADA that they’d written to generate it?

I imagine it’s like storing JVM bytecode, ie class files instead of Java files. So when you open it up the editor decompiles it , like IntelliJ does if you try to open a class file, but then it also applies your own style, like from .editorconfig, on the code it shows. It’s a really good idea and I can’t believe people here are complaining that it’s bad because they can’t use grep! But that’s a good thing!! Who the hell is grepping code as if code had no structure and that’s the best you can do? So you also grep JSON instead of using jq? Just don’t!