Interesting Issue

[Aaron VonderHaar]

I'll concede that someone _might_ want to write
un*fucking*be_liev_able, and the it would be nice not to be prevented
from writing that.  But ... I can only recall two or three times in my
life that I ever actually have bolded or italicised part of a word. 
In contrast, I type things like $long_winded_value or
MAGIC_DATE_CONSTANT_PART_FIVE typically several times a day.

For my own personal use, it would be much more convenient to have '_'
only emphasize entire words, and if I ever do need
"im<em>pres</em>sive", I'll just type that directly.  I suspect that
this would be the case for most people.  At least for programmers.  I
suppose for a novelist, the opposite may be true.


On Thu,  9 Dec 2004 01:01:26 -0500, John Gruber <gruber at fedora.net> wrote:
> Christopher Biagini <chris at assortedgeekery.com> wrote on 12/09/04 at 12:09am:
> 
> > I'm writing a paper for one of my classes, and I quote some manpages
> > that make mention of constants with underscores in their
> > names--Markdown treats the underscores as the start and end of
> > emphasized text.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Which isn't quite what I had in mind. Is this an unfortunate
> > consequence of proper behavior, or a bug?
> 
> Unfortunate consequence.
> 
> What you can do is backslash-escape the literal underscores. By
> default, underscores and asterisks are emphasis delimiters in
> Markdown, not literal punctuation characters. So you could write:
> 
>     ... blah blah PTHREAD\_SCOPE\_SYSTEM ...
> 
> to produce:
> 
>     ... blah blah PTHREAD_SCOPE_SYSTEM ...
> 
> in your output.
> 
> A lot of times, especially with underscores, they're being used in a
> code context, so it might be appropriate to wrap them in code spans:
> 
>     ... blah blah `PTHREAD\_SCOPE\_SYSTEM` ...
> 
> which produces:
> 
>     ... blah blah <code>PTHREAD_SCOPE_SYSTEM</code> ...
> 
> * * *
> 
> The problem here is that it's very natural to just instinctively
> write what you mean. Human minds are so adept at pattern and
> language recognition that we don't even think of it as a problem.
> I can write this:
> 
>     No, *you* told me that *'s are called "asterisks".
> 
> Or:
> 
>     I _never_ told you that $THIS_VARIABLE or $THAT_VARIABLE could
>     be modified in the middle of the loop.
> 
> and you know exactly what I mean with those '*' and '_' characters.
> You don't even have to think about it. But it's devilishly tricky to
> get a computer program to understand the difference contexts there.
> 
> Some people have suggested that Markdown should only allow emphasis
> to start and end at the beginning of "words", so that you can use
> underscores mid-word without triggering <em> tags. But I think
> that's too strict, because sometimes you want to emphasis only part
> of a word:
> 
>     un*fucking*believable
> 
> Maybe there's some additional cleverness we can add, however.
> 
> -J.G.
> 
> 
> 
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