that's exactly what I mean by standard serialization format - format of code exchanged between people and programs. You can always rely on the standard way (for example the one presented here) when reading code on github or when you open it in your text editor by default, and then if you have another way you prefer that it be formatted, you can use a program to format it that way for you while you work on it - however when you commit it, it's formatted the standard way not your special way.

We've conflated how the code is stored with how it looks. We need to separate these. That's one of the problems with equating code with text: they're different things. Code is data (or objects), text is a way to represent code.