The hard part is finding out which elements are named the same in both HTML and Perlmonks, but act differently. <code> for instance means something else in HTML than in Perlmonks.

code tags are something I use often enough that they're not hard to remember.

But I still haven't figured out how the <a> element is working on Perlmonks.

Hmmm. I haven't run into that one. As near as I can tell, it works like in regular HTML. Must be I just haven't tried the right (or wrong) thing yet.

Easier to remember, but not easier to type.

Agreed, I find having to escape the left square bracket annoying (I did say it was one of my two pet annoyances on pm, didn't I?), and doing the editing in a browser textarea control instead of a real editor doesn't help this any. Sometimes I'm tempted to do a whole post in Emacs and copy-and-paste it over. Sometimes I do that. I suppose the bracket syntax for perlmonks was taken from E2 and/or Wiki, but I've always wondered why the same things couldn't be done with angle brackets...

However, retrofitting those changes now would be quite painful, as all existing nodes would be impacted (and that's ignoring developing and testing the code for the changes).

At least in POD

Please, no POD. I do *not* want to try deal with significant whitespace in a feature-impoverished browser textarea, and if you think getting newbies to use code tags and whatnot is hard with an HTML-like markup, just you think about trying to convince newbies who want help with PERL that they should post their question with POD markup. Gah. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.

$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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