Possible bug in Markdown.pl with `<<` handling

[John Gruber]

Fletcher T. Penney <fletcher at alumni.duke.edu> wrote on 9/13/06 at 6:29 AM:


> Perhaps I am ignoring something obvious - but when does `<<` ever  

> occur in XHTML?  Shouldn't it be a safe assumption that Markdown  

> should convert any string of multiple `<`'s in a row into `&lt;`'s?


This is perhaps a contrived example, but if someone put this in a
Markdown document:

    <<?php print "p";?>>

they might reasonably expect the output to be:

    <p>

not:

    &lt;&lt;?php print "p";?&gt;&gt;

We can't have it both ways. The current "if it looks like a tag,
Markdown treats it as a tag" rule seems simpler and more obvious
to me than your proposed "if it looks like a tag, it's treated as
a tag, unless the angle brackets are in a consecutive run of other
angle brackets, in which case they're all treated as literal angle
brackets" rule.

-J.G.