Comment by scelerat

Markdown drew its influences from predecessor structured text languages whose goal was minimum formatting of ASCII text in a structured way such that it could be parsed and re-rendered into any other format.

The goal was simplicity and readability in plain-text email and Usenet posts so I'm not surprised that fifteen years from its inception, and thirty or more years on from some its antecedents, we're using text and thinking about how we use text differently. One of Markdown's pivots from setext was the addition of code blocks. In the environment that setext was created, a code block would simply be rendered much like everything else: in the plain and probably fixed-width display that your email was also displayed in. By 2004, email had rich formatting, Usenet was on the wane, and people still needed a lightweight text format to share. Markdown filled that need, as did a number of other similar alternatives, though I forget their names.

My first exposure to such lightly-formatted ASCII was setext [1] which was the format chosen for the Mac- and Apple-oriented TidBITS email newsletter [2]. As a contributor to that newsletter, Gruber would have been intimately aware of the format.

Twenty years ago, I used setext in code projects basically the same way as nearly everyone uses Markdown now. I like OP's suggestions though I've always liked the 'lazy' approach to ordered lists.

[1] setext: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setext

[2] TidBITS: https://tidbits.com