In 1958, Mahatma Gandhi was quoted as follows: > The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's > greed. In [The CommonMark Specification](https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/) John MacFarlane writes: > What distinguishes Markdown from many other lightweight markup syntaxes, > which are often easier to write, is its readability. As Gruber writes: > > The overriding design goal for Markdown's formatting syntax is to make it > > as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should > > be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up > > with tags or formatting instructions. ( > > ) > The point can be illustrated by comparing a sample of AsciiDoc with an > equivalent sample of Markdown. Here is a sample of AsciiDoc from the AsciiDoc > manual: > ```AsciiDoc > 1. List item one. > + > List item one continued with a second paragraph followed by an > Indented block. > + > ................. > $ ls *.sh > $ mv *.sh ~/tmp > ................. > + > List item continued with a third paragraph. > > 2. List item two continued with an open block. > ... > ``` The quotation includes an embedded quotation and a code quotation and ends with an ellipsis due to being incomplete. Now let's have an indented code block: #include int main(void) { printf("# hello markdown\n"); return 0; } and end with a fenced code block: ~~~pseudocode #include #include a block { a statement; another statement; } ~~~