I'm still looking for an answer to the question.

Weird, because I answered it. You need to look at the opcode tree to see if the next op in the caller is a dereference.

People have functions that grab onto operators and such all the time.

No idea what that means.

It's call 'syntactic sugar'

I didn't say being magical was bad, I said what you wanted was too magical. There is syntactic sugar, and then there is syntactic sludge.

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It also violates the HTML standard.

So? I'm sure you'll find it's violated in many other ways since this site doesn't accept HTML, but something similar to it.

Just put a <p> at the front of every paragraph, and put computer text (input, output, code) in <c>...</c> tags.

If PM used a keyword that wasn't part of the HTML standard, like 'literal', then there wouldn't be a prob,

Actually, it wouldn't help at all. Those tools you mention would misparse the contents of the tag no matter what it's called.

At least slashdot is smart enough to recognize plaintext and leave it as such .. whereas here...all formatting is stripped, and a proprietary formatting language is used...ug!

Your "ug" is misplaced. It should be attached to "all formatting is stripped". Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not a good solution.