Manually specify language for syntax highlighting [duplicate]

Question

This is a follow-up to a question I answered earlier (Changes to syntax highlighting).

---

For most questions that have more than one language-related tag and those with fuzzy languages (for instance .net!), there should be an option to specify which language to use in syntax highlighting because sometimes (and quite often too!) the language inference is wrong.

Take for instance the scenario I describe below.

When an answer is given in a language other than the "primary language" (which happens to be C#), the code is still highlighted as C# even if it isn't in that language!

Scenario

1. Take any question that has multiple explicit language-related tags.
   For example: Webclient.UploadFile which is tagged tagged c#, .net, vb.net and webclient.
2. Try to answer the question with code that is different from the 'major' language.
   In this case, try answering the question with VB.NET code.

Expected Results: Code should be highlighted in VB.NET.
Actual Result: Code was highlighted in C#!

Suggested Solution
There should be a way to explicitly set the language for syntax highlighting.


Edit

It also turns out that asking a question with multiple explicit language-related tags can also give you wrong syntax highlighting!
You can try creating a new question with the following and observe the preview:

    //This is C#
    var someValue = GetValue();

some text to separate the two languages

    'This is VB.Net
    Dim someValue = GetValue()

Tag the question as follows (in the specific order) vb.net, .net c#

You'll notice without fail that the C# code gets highlighted properly and the vb.net code doesn't.

Disclaimer
All observations are based on the preview you get while entering the question or answer so my observed result might not be wholly right.

Answer 1

This is now implemented. See:

https://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#syntax-highlighting

In addition to tag inference (a recent change), you can manually specify the language as a hint to Google Code Prettify.

The spec is:

``` lang-or-tag-here
code goes here
```

<!-- language: lang-or-tag-here -->

    code goes here

<!-- language: lang-or-tag-here -->

    code goes here

You can also specify the hint to apply to all following code blocks with language-all:

<!-- language-all: lang-or-tag-here -->

You may use either a tag or a prettify language code to specify, though prettify language codes are always guaranteed to work regardless of what language the tag happens to be set to.

Available Language Hints Moved

Due to several lists of available hints existing throughout Meta, the entire list has been consolidated and moved to the following FAQ:

What is syntax highlighting and how does it work?

Answer 2

If there is a question about, for instance, a specific branch of a tag (like "android-emulator" for instance) that does include some code, the standard language-filter that kicks in for "android" (java i presume :) ) does not work. So a code-part that's far-from complete will not be prettified. I would say it would not be too strange to be able to hint the language!

Answer 3

In cases that more than one language tag is present, prettify will attempt to infer the language. In these cases it will not always infer the correct language, but it seems to do a nice job from what I have seen. I oppose this request as I do not think it is necessary.