Among the many other problems with your proposal, you are assuming an editor that can only insert and delete characters, so no selection, copy, paste, search and replace, and any other features that involve modifying more than just one character in a document at a time, since you're critically depending not just on the fact that all edits can theoretically be represented by single character changes but that the rate of such changes must necessarily be very, very low, bounded by human typing speed.
"OK, so to fix that, I'll just..."
That'll break in some other case. If you then work on fixing that up, in another 20 or 30 steps, you end up at these algorithms. Or something far worse, which is actually pretty likely if you try to bodge something together one hyper-local problem at a time.
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Among the many other problems with your proposal, you are assuming an editor that can only insert and delete characters, so no selection, copy, paste, search and replace, and any other features that involve modifying more than just one character in a document at a time, since you're critically depending not just on the fact that all edits can theoretically be represented by single character changes but that the rate of such changes must necessarily be very, very low, bounded by human typing speed.
"OK, so to fix that, I'll just..."
That'll break in some other case. If you then work on fixing that up, in another 20 or 30 steps, you end up at these algorithms. Or something far worse, which is actually pretty likely if you try to bodge something together one hyper-local problem at a time.
No, op is assuming that an editor can only _replace_ characters.