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Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing

As someone who has from time to time written on parsing, and even published some parsing research, I get asked questions about parsing fairly regularly, some of which I’m even capable of answering. One thing that I’ve increasingly been made aware of is a widening interest in “fancier” ways of editing text.

However, there’s a reason why structured editors haven’t taken over the world: most programmers find them so annoying to use in some situations that they don’t view the pros as outweighing the cons. Typically, especially as a tool matures, some non-structural editing is allowed, but often only quite specific kinds, sometimes requiring you telling the editor in advance that you want to temporarily do things it rather you didn’t. I hope this post serves as a useful advert to such folk that incremental parsing exists, and Tim’s and Lukas’s theses specifically, are absolutely worth the investment of time in reading.

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