underscore and italic policy

[Sam Joseph]

Hi All,

So I just joined the list - first off, Markdown is a great format and
we're using it in our online community project disCourse:

http://discourse.ics.hawaii.edu

We're using markdown for our wiki pages, stories, message postings,
pretty much everywhere.

One markdown policy that doesn't seem to fit intuitively for our users
is the fact that embedded underscores leads to italics.

My apologies if this is an already much discussed aspect of Markdown,
but while the syntax for showing embedded underscores (escaping them) is
clear, I can't think of many situations where one would want embedded
italics.

In our user community at least the much more common use of embedded
underscores is in database table names and file names, e.g.

my_fave_file.txt
user_workspaces_tbl

Whatever the official markdown policy I think we will override it
locally for our disCourse system, but I was interested to know what
other markdown users thought.

Many thanks in advance
CHEERS> SAM