Oh, come on! This is 2004, who doesn't know about <p> and <br>? besides here is the first entry in Writeup Formatting Tips:

Carriage returns are stripped

All carriage returns are ignored in posts except within <CODE> sections. Use a <br> to get a line-break and a <p> tag to get a paragraph break.

Maybe the entry about wrapping code in <code> tags could be moved up in the list, but still, I would expect anyone on this forum to be able to write a simple post.