I believe this functionality is only indispensable for runtime reflection, where I know a lot of people who execute dynamically assembled code. All the uses of c.parse that I've seen fall into the category "boy, I wish I had quasiquotes". 

Therefore I think it makes sense to deprecate and eventually remove this method from Context. That would also serve a didactic role for those who are currently using c.parse to construct trees from string literals, being scared away from the verbosity of manual tree construction.

This might sound a bit far-fetched, but I think that we should really strive for having a single possible way of constructing trees. In the worst case, if c.parse ends up being really important, we'll just undeprecate it in 2.12.