Recap syntax ideas for Markdown?

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Damian Cugley <damian.cugley at gmail.com> [2005-04-13 04:54]:
> I'm new here so this may already have been discussed, but I
> would prefer that x^2 was represented `x^2`.   It would supify
> a single token (word or number).  For anything other than a
> single token, we could allow `x^(a + b)`.

That makes a lot of sense. The only issue I see is that the
plaintext looks differs from the way the markup renders. Eg how
would I achieve an output of `x<sup>(a + b)</sup>`? Would that
have to be written `x^((a + b))` in Markdown? If not, and a
simple `x^(a + b)` actually translates directly to
`x<sup>(a + b)</sup>`, then how do I get Markdown to give me an
output of `x<sup>a + b</sup>`?

There’s a problem here with the discrepance of looks in text vs
rendering and Markdown’s goal that its source documents should
look as much like the intended output as possible.

Thinking about it, it might be a solution to use a backslash
here. `x^(a + b)` comes out as `x<sup>(a + b)</sup>`, but
`x^\(a + b)` comes out as `x<sup>a + b</sup>`.

The problem is that while it works decently with something like
`^_` for subscripts, it starts to look rather very TeXish:

    i^_(j, k)    ->    i<sup>(j, k)</sup>
    i^_\(j, k)   ->    i<sup>j, k</sup>

Hmm…

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle