Block quotes with a blank line between them get merged

[Jacob Rus]

A. Pagaltzis wrote:

> * John Gruber <gruber at fedora.net> [2006-10-19 06:35]:

>> I'd rather have line prefixes. I know they're harder to

>> generate in textarea fields, because you have to do them by

>> hand, but I'm finding it harder and harder to care about the

>> plight of the textarea-field-writer.

>>

>>     ~   function db_like($first, $pattern) {

>>     [...]

> 

> I find those Aesthetically highly offensive.

> 

> I would suggest pipes, which I've seen used in the wild, although

> I guess those might clash with a potential future table markup.

> 

> Other options with some precedent include hash marks and percent

> signs; both are markers for single-line comments in some

> languages, so code blocks prefixed with them is not an uncommon

> sight. Of those I'd favour the percent sign, because while it has

> much less precedent, the hash mark looks very heavy.


Can it be explained again why we need to have this explicit character at 
the beginning of lines?  Is there some particular case of block quotes 
for which markdown isn't perfectly sufficient right now?  This seems to 
me like change for change's sake, without sufficient justification.

One final thing:  In code and other preformatted text, whitespace is 
significant.  The current rules allow us to figure out exactly where the 
beginning of the line is, so that any space character added beyond that 
becomes part of the code block.  In this new system, where every line 
begins with, for example, a `~` character, how many spaces will be 
stripped after the `~`?  Any choice made here will be arbitrary, and 
will disagree with the way some number of people write the other types 
of blocks, such as block quotations.  So if I write:

     code block:

     ~   this is a block of code
     ~   starting with tildes

will that be interpreted differently than:

     code block:

     ~ this is a block of code
     ~ starting with tildes

or:

     code block:

       ~ this is a block of code
       ~ starting with tildes

or:

     code block:

     ~this is a block of code
     ~starting with tildes

If we replace `~` with `>`, these would all be interpreted as identical 
block quotations.  With this new rule, a choice will need to be made 
which steps on someone's toes.  And as far as I can tell, for no 
particular reason.

-Jacob