start on a summary in the readme

Author: parrt

README.md

@@ -1,2 +1,21 @@
-# Groom pretty printer
+# CodeBuff smart formatter
+
+## Abstract
+
+Code formatting is not particularly exciting but many researchers would consider it either unsolved or not well-solved.  The two well-established solutions are:
+
+1.  Build a custom program that formats code for specific a language with ad hoc techniques, typically subject to parameters such as "*always put a space between operators*".
+2.  Define a set of formal rules that map input patterns to layout instructions such as "*line these expressions up vertically*".
+
+Either techniques are painful and finicky.  
+
+This repository is a step towards what we hope will be a universal code formatter that looks for patterns in a corpus and attempts to format code using those patterns.  
+
+##  Mechanism
+
+For a given language *L*, the input to CodeBuff is:
+
+1. a grammar for *L*
+2. a set of input files written in *L*
+3. a file written in *L* but not in the corpus that you would like to format