Nicolas Goaziou <m...@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes: > Hello, > > Nick Dokos <ndo...@gmail.com> writes: > >> Is the "* on column 0 is a headline" convention a consequence of the >> dependence on outline.el? Or is it just historical baggage? I cannot >> remember the grammar rules, but I'm wondering if the parser could be >> made to say "not a headline" in this situation, and if so, what the >> consequences might be (particularly, the bad consequences). >> >> I'm not sure whether Nicolas has actually explained this situation in >> the past, but, with gmane non compos mentis, I did not attempt to find >> an earlier discussion. > > This is inherent on how the syntax is defined, and how the parser is > implemented. As an outliner, the main syntactic element in an Org > document is the headline. Everything else has a lower priority. > Therefore, a block will not be parsed before a headline. > > The good side of headlines being top level elements is that parsing > (without cache) only needs to start from the closest headline above. If > blocks could be parsed before headlines, parsing should start from the > beginning of the document every time. >
Thank you. I appreciate both your patience and your explanations. -- Nick
