Code Blocks with Syntax Highlighting

[stephenjamieson]

I possible it would be great to have Syntax Highlighting for code blocks such as github accomplishes with ```

example:

var = what
$what = "2"

[masukomi]

I love this idea, and there are a number of good libraries to handle it. Octopress, for example uses pygments.rb, and there are JavaScript only libraries which might be a good choice too

But here's the question that's left me without adding it yet:

What's the best way to implement language specific syntax highlighting without creating something that isn't Markdown, or Multimarkdown?

I think the syntax Octopress is currently going with is best I've seen

``` [language] [title] [url] [link text]
code snippet
```

They used to use something that involved curly braces and made your posts decidedly not markdown, so I didn't realize someone had come up with a more markdownish variant.

I think we should probably borrow Octopress's implementation for this, but the extra time required to process this (not that its huge) makes me think we should probably pre-compile the HTML for each post's content and start using that when rendering the pages. In the end we'd get the syntax highlighting and faster page loads.