What should we do with ast-golf?

Question

The ast-golf tag is a winning criterion where the program with the least AST nodes wins. This seems like a subset of atomic-code-golf, where the program with the least operations by some definition wins.

It has one question, which looks quite similar to a typical atomic-code-golf question:

Scoring Heuristics

The following rules are typically enough to calculate the score of your program:

• Block statements are 1 points: if, for ... in ..., while, else, etc.

• Standalone statements are 1 point: print in Python 2, break, pass, etc.

• Variables are 2 points

• ...

Also, the original intent of the atomic-code-golf tag was to count a single token per statement / value / similar in a program, in an attempt to level the playing field.

So, what should we do with ast-golf?

Answer 1

Merge it into atomic-code-golf

Do we really need code-challenge ast-golf for this? Isn't this just a specific form of atomic-code-golf?
- Martin Ender

The reason I did it this way is because the tag text for atomic-code-golf says "Atomic code golf is scored by the number of tokens of your program," and that's not the same as this, though perhaps only a pretty small amount.
- isaacg

Given that:

1. there have been no other ast-golf questions in over five years and
2. the OP admits that it's nearly the same as atomic-code-golf and
3. it's since been retagged as atomic-code-golf

I don't think the slight difference in scoring from regular atomic-code-golf makes enough of a difference to keep a separate tag. This challenge is a variant of atomic-code-golf, the same way that a challenge that counts box-drawing characters as one byte is a variant of code-golf, or that a challenge about xiangqi is a variant of chess.

It might be worth updating the atomic-code-golf tag wiki to explicitly include this kind of variant.