Don't mark cell as stale on comments/whitespace changes?

[anjiro]

Description

It would be nice to have cells not get marked as "stale" when I only change comments or add/remove whitespace lines.

Suggested solution

Here's an example. The original cell:

foo=37 #Number of Formal Optimization Operations
bar=99

Changes that I don't want to make the cell marked as stale:

# Define important variables

foo = 37    # Number of Formal Optimization Operations
bar = 99    # Number of Basic Adjustment Repetitions

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

[mscolnick]

This is a good suggestion, I think we can handle this.

Are there any edge cases you can think of? Do any libraries work off comments? I know some work off documentation (like doctests), but those exist in triple quotes.

[dmadisetti]

AST compilation will leave doc strings, but strip normal comments. Most implementations would work on this.

There are pep ignore and tidy comments, but that shouldn't alter execution

[mscolnick]

@dmadisetti it would be nice to figure out "edited" on the frontend instead of a sever request

python AST parsing would be the most reliable. I may try the code-mirror lezer ast parsing on the front end. Any thoughts / issues with that?

[mscolnick]

Actually, we may still want it to be stale since its not "saved" yet. I have a branch exploring this: #3145

Maybe the coloring is different? Could add more confusion

[dmadisetti]

Could be backlogged until/ if server side model comes along. I agree that it probably doesn't merit its own endpoint

Re save: could use an icon, or vscode uses a little bubble right?

[mscolnick]

yea, we could. right now save only saves what has been run, not what has been written. we could keep that, but then you may have white space that is never gets saved