oh, bother, I forgot what HN does to asterisks. In what I wrote above, look for the bit in italics and mentally insert asterisks on each side of it. It was right when I typed it in, I promise...
HN converts asterisks to italics and I too couldn't find a way to escape them, except when surrounded by backticks `*`. Not a C-friendly discussion forum :-)
No I didn't, HN mangled the text to italics and I did not spot it. Too late to edit. That's why lisp and C are in italics :) How do you make an asterisk in HN anyway?
If you edit to replace your asterisks with [STAR], your post will make more sense. To the best of my knowledge the only reliably way to get an asterisk to display in an HN post is to use only one. (Maybe sometimes stick it in the middle of the word.) Backslash does nothing useful.
You should know that HN lets you prefix stars with a backslash to escape them, so your text ends up saying, ex. foo*bar and bar*baz rather than foobar and barbaz
When writing a comment on HN, if you wrap a word in asterisks, they disappear and the word is italicized. That’s how Markdown-based text works, but usually the user can place a backslash before the first asterisk to escape it (e.g. try on GitHub) in order to prevent this and instead display the asterisks literally. This does not seem to be possible on HN. Is there an alternative?
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