Block quotes with a blank line between them get merged

Jacob Rus jrus at hcs.harvard.edu
Fri Oct 20 00:37:23 EDT 2006


Michel Fortin wrote:

> I'm not sure if John opposes the two blank lines rule or not; what I'm

> sure is that he opposes taking into account the invisible indentation of

> these blank lines into account. And I agree with that position.


The current rule is that code blocks start with four spaces or one tab
of indentation. If a line has nothing but four spaces or a tab, that
unambiguously suggests that the line should be an empty line in a code
block. But equally, two completely blank lines, without any spaces at
all, could quite unambiguously define the end of an environment such as
a code block.

But I posit that this is really a non-issue, as there is almost no use
for multiple consecutive code blocks with no commentary in between. I
have never seen such a pattern used, and if in the one time in a million
it comes up, the user needs to examine the whitespace in detail to
figure out which is intended, I don't think it's worth adding an (ugly)
extra syntax to fix.

-Jacob



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