Those states are only ill-defined on the assumption that you're entering text which will be parsed. You can still enter fragments when operations are in terms o

Those states are only ill-defined on the assumption that you're entering text which will be parsed. You can still enter fragments when operations are in terms of language constructs rather than characters--you have just supplied a partial set of parameters to the construct, which you can go back and finish later. Maybe the other part of this issue is expecting to use these potentially better editors in the same way we use text editors. I would bet different patterns of interaction would surface for the new editors which aren't obvious from our present standpoint.