Well, the “right” way to do it would be to make the textual representation of the syntax a view layer concern and not the format in which the code was serialized. For example, you could store everything as s-expressions or some binary representation of an AST and then have a lens that pretty prints the code with the programmers preferred syntax and the reverses the programmer’s edits to the underlying serialization format.

I suspect this would work best for an image-based smalltalk-like system where the “source of truth” would be the version of the code persisted in the image and then the textual representation would be generated from that on demand.