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Anyone who has been bitten by that one a couple times will just do the sane thing and escape the underscores or use backtick code tags around the words you need to have underscores in.

It would only be _obviously_ wrong if it didn't even let you workaround the format characters.

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I'm not sure why you think escaping is an obvious and suitable concept for a simple markup language like Markdown.

When trying to write a grammar that describes Markdown escaping is the obvious and suitable solution.

Its because its so simple that it causes the surprising behavior. But it is only surprising the first time. After that you realize that everything between two underscores means highlight that section of text. If you actually wanted the underscores you have to do it manually, whats wrong with that?

The common case should be simple. How often do I want to italicize part of a word? That's what should require escaping.

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