bug#74994: Upstreaming org-element-ast (was: Improving Emacs' iCalendar support)

[Richard Lawrence]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> writes:

> In bug#74994, Richard made a decision not to use org-element-ast and
> instead implement a custom parser generator.
>
> Richard, is there any specific reason why you had to make things from
> scratch? May org-element-ast be changed to fit your needs?
>
> If org-element-ast is not going to be useful outside Org mode, I see no
> good reason to invest time into upstreaming it, after all.

No, it was more that, as things stood, I wanted to wait and see what
would happen with upstreaming org-element-ast. My idea was to make it
easy to switch once that happened, but not to wait to make progress in
the meantime, that's all.

One thing about your question confuses me, namely: 

> ...instead implement a custom parser generator.

As I understand org-element-ast, it basically just defines the parse
tree representation and various accessors for working with it, not the
parser itself. Was your suggestion that I could also use the Org parser,
not just the parse tree representation? If so, then I misunderstood, and
presumably more code is involved than is found in org-element-ast.el,
right?

Best,
Richard