Pseudocode block formatting

[James Young]

We want to describe some pseudocode, with placeholders, like, toward the end of chapter 1.6:

previously

At times, we've had:

• italics in a code block, which doesn't work *well* - that's a problem in many places, honestly
• non-breaking spaces -  
• nested block quotes and new lines

I think these are ugly and/or error-prone to use.

other symbols

We could use other symbols to delineate placeholder text here, like [square brackets] or {curly brackets}.

using html pre tag

A possible solution: drop back to the <pre> html tag. Here's how that looks:

function first-name(name):
    if the first element of name is a title
        then return the first-name of the rest of the name
        else return the first element of the name

That was made with:

<pre>
function first-name(name):
    if <i>the first element of name is a title</i>
        then <i>return the</i> first-name <i>of the rest of the name</i>
        else <i>return the first element of the name</i>
</pre>

Any thoughts or suggestions?