Improve formatting of doc code blocks
We don't currently apply automatic formatting to doc comment code blocks. As a
result, it has built up various idiosyncracies, which make such automatic
formatting difficult. Some of those idiosyncracies also make things harder for
human readers or other tools.
This PR makes a few improvements to doc code formatting, in the hopes of making
future automatic formatting easier, as well as in many cases providing net
readability improvements.
I would suggest reading each commit separately, as each commit contains one
class of changes.
d082ff4c04