Symbols are not context free, though. And words being compound symbols means they are heavily dependent on context. Pretty much period. You can argue that I

Symbols are not context free, though. And words being compound symbols means they are heavily dependent on context. Pretty much period. You can argue that I should be able to copy a method invocation and move it, but I confess I don't even really understand what that would mean or how it would help me. More, you are fixed in a global evaluation sense of the work, now. What if I want to take a formula in code, evaluate its derivative, and then use that for evaluating input? (That is, the exact same code depends on where it is But, again, my point was not that we can find the reason it doesn't work. I don't know the reason it doesn't work. I don't even know for sure that it can't work. What I do know is that no other communication has distilled to this level of editing. Happy to be proven wrong. I had meant to edit my post to refer to this all as "a" problem that this idea will face. Specifically that no other editing of anything that I am aware of happens at this level. There are some neat composition tools that can put together some scenes in this way, I think. Such that maybe there is more of a generalization there than I think there is. Seems very unlikely, though. Now, oddly, I do think software is best made to enable this style of construction for what it controls. Easy example would be a level editor in a video game. That makes surprisingly little sense to do in a symbol based editor, as opposed to a palette based visual editor. Such that I think I'm open to the idea, at some level. Symbol manipulation is just not that level, for most things.