I figured out that inserting `hline' works for some languages.  consistent behavior with ":colnames yes" would be ideal but this solves my problem.

#+BEGIN_SRC elisp
  '((one two) hline (1 3) (1 6))
#+END_SRC

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 7:48 AM ian martins <ianxm@jhu.edu> wrote:
Hello, I'm trying to figure out how to tell org that the first row of a src block result is a table header.

from readthedocs it looks like ":colnames yes" should do this, but I haven't been able to get it to work, and the code doesn't appear to want that to happen. maybe that is special handling for R.

#+BEGIN_SRC elisp :colnames yes
  '((one two) (1 3) (1 6))
#+END_SRC

I'm expecting an hline in the output but do not find one.

I know ":colnames '(one two)" works, but I don't know the header value until I've generated the table.

-Ian