We decided early in the Roslyn design process that the primary data structure that developers would use when analyzing code via Roslyn is the syntax tree. And thus one of the hardest parts of the early Roslyn design was figuring out how we were going to implement syntax tree nodes, and what information they would proffer up to the user. We would like to have a data structure that has the following characteristics:

• Immutable.
• The form of a tree.
• Cheap access to parent nodes from child nodes.
• Possible to map from a node in the tree to a character offset in the text.
• Persistent.

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