Preserving Non-essential Information Related to the Presentation of a Language Instance

In this article, we look at issues related to the preservation and re-generation of non-essential aspects like style and formatting for diagrams and code for different presentations of a computer language. We will primarily examine these issues from a meta-modelling perspective. We may encounter these issues when we have different presentations for a language and have to generate code/diagram fragments as a result of synchronisation between the different presentations. Similar issues may arise if we want to store the model (an instance of the meta-model that defines the language) instead of the source text or diagram, and have to re-generate the code/diagram. We describe how existing tools and approaches handle these issues, then we look at what solutions for storing the style information are possible. We develop some requirements and look at how the possible solutions support these requirements, and finally we discuss some ideas for implementation based on the recommended solutions.