seemingly no good way to end bulleted list and start code block

[John MacFarlane]

> So I'm seriously thinking about adding a second (unindented) code block 

> syntax to PHP Markdown Extra that would avoid this issue entirely. 

> Something like this:

>

>     Regular paragraph

>

>     ~~~

>     Code block

>     ~~~


I like the idea of doing something about this problem.  I've been
thinking about adding something like this to pandoc, too, and it
would be good if possible to reach some agreement on a syntax.

If I recall, in the previous thread there were two suggestions for 
solving the problem: 

1.  adding delimited unindented code blocks, along the lines of
    what you suggested above

2.  adopting the convention that two blank lines end a list (or
    footnote or other block element in which indentation is used
    to indicate continuation blocks).

Do people have views about the comparative advantages and disadvantages
of these approaches?

An advantage of (2) is that it provides a clean way to have two
consecutive lists of the same type.

An advantage of (1) is that it allows you to cut and paste code without
adding or removing indentation. It's also something that you see quite
often in emails, and thus goes along with markdown's general philosophy
of using established conventions.

However, I prefer ======== to ~~~~~~~~~~ for this purpose, because
====== is vertically centered on the line and gives you a more
symmetrical look. Compare:

~~~~~~~~~
example 1
~~~~~~~~~

=========
example 2
=========

As long as a blank line is required before the string of ======='s,
there is no danger of confusing this with a Setext-style header.

John