edit: solved by a helpful commenter
it changes the font, but doesn't create a box, condenses everything to a single line (even with two spaces after each line), and the backticks don't go away.
turning this:
into this:
if (whatever) { hmmmm(); }
it seems to do the same thing with a <code> block, but it replaces the tags with backticks (which are then visible)
but i have seen properly-formatted code on here. the code tag is full of it! so what am i doing wrong?
