Having a keyboard shortcut to select the current word at the caret position would be useful - most editors have such a feature.
It would work like this:
1) Look at the current position of the caret within the edited text
2) Iterate backwards until the first whitespace, ',', or ';' character
3) Iterate forward until the first whitespace, ',' or ';' character
4) Put editor selection spanning the resulting computed character range