Is it possible to parse templates *in order*?

[civility-bot]

I pasted a template from another system and I'm running into a weird error with it while converting it to Sparkpost:

1. Sparkpost tells me there's an error at line 174.
2. I delete the entire code block that ends at that line.
3. Now Sparkpost tells me there's an error at line 162.

What's going on here? How was line 162 OK before, when the error was at line 174? Missing ending tag or something?

Anyway, I keep deleting, and ultimately the error was way earlier,

line 130: substitution value 'discussion' did not exist or was null

So it wasn't a missing tag, but a missing substitution value. This should have been flagged immediately.