In this contribution, I will argue that the key to the next level of digital scholarly editing is to be found in computation, that is, in the actual coding of the whole editorial workflow. I will present the theory, the advantages and the challenges of such a computational approach to the editing of pre-modern texts, backing up my claims with examples from the praxis and from my own scholarly work in the field of digital philology. Of course, the field of computational editing is still in its infancy, which means that fully computational editions have not been published yet. However, there are projects<ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" n="1" target="ftn1" /> which can already prove the validity of the arguments presented in this paper or that at least seem to move in the same direction.