Comment by throwaway_pdp09

Maybe my wording is not accurate, imagine the following (not necessarily idiomatic) C code:

    int main() {
        int x;
        {
            int x[];
        // <-- caret here
        x += 42;
    }

This code doesn't compile, so the IDE tries to produce a partial AST. A naive approach will result in the first } matching with the second {, so `x += 42;` will cause a type error. But as noticable from the indentation, it is more believable that there was or will be } matching with the second { at the caret position and `x += 42;` refers to the outer scope.

Yes, of course parsers can account for the indentation in this case. But more generally this kind of parsing is sensitive to a series of edit sequences, not just the current code. This makes incremental parsing a much different problem from ordinary parsing, and also is likely why ibains and folks use packrat parsing (which can be easily made incremental).