I've been wondering lately if it would be possible to make an entire compiler stack incremental, so that the binary changes on disk as I type. I am positively sick of waiting tens of seconds or even minutes for the compiler to redo all the work it's already done thousands of times just to make a one-byte change to my binary.

Presumably, moving to an infrastructure like this (everything is incremental) is the biggest difference between Old compilers and New compilers, because of the ubiquitous IDE. I think I remember watching a talk by Anders Hejlsberg about this.

Well, you can already have half of a split unicode character at the beginning and end of a substring in the rope.

If that doesn't happen (like in the "parens" or "other" description), to use CYK, I think you could maybe have piece of the table for each substring (so for all entries with both indices inside the substring) in each node but then I don't think the operation at the parent is commutative. And you have to decide to copy the info from the children or not (if not, you'll spend an extra log n time looking down the tree).