[panstromek]

> what if the parsing step was performed immediately on stop symbols rather than later and merged with the program graph immediately rather than during a separate build step?

I think this is the way to go, kinda like on Github, where you write markdown in the comments, but that is only used for input, after that it's merged into the system, all code-like constructs (links, references, images) are resolveed and from then you interact with the higher level concept (rendered comment with links and images).

For programinng langauge, Unison does this - you write one function at a time in something like a REPL and functions are saved in content addressed database.

> Or what if it was like "staging" step?

Yes, and I guess it'd have to go even deeper. The system should be able to represent broken program (in edited state), so conceptually it has to be something like a structured database for code which separates the user input from stored semantic representation and the final program.

IDE's like IntelliJ already build a program model like this and incrementally update it as you edit, they just have to work very hard to do it and that model is imperfect.

There's million issues to solve with this, though. It's a hard problem.