Comment by fiddlosopher

The motivation for this choice is not "convenient parsing" but deeper considerations of language design. As explained at https://github.com/jgm/djot#rationale , this choice follows from two desiderata: (1) "The syntax should compose uniformly, in the following sense: if a sequence of lines has a certain meaning outside a list item or block quote, it should have the same meaning inside it." (2) "The syntax should be friendly to hard-wrapping: hard-wrapping a paragraph should not lead to different interpretations, e.g. when a number followed by a period ends up at the beginning of a line." The document explains the compromise we made in commonmark to avoid the need for blank lines. Djot tries to be more principled.