I’ve just released a WordPress plugin for disabling smart quotes in text that is inside a <code> block. Smart quotes, also known as curly quotes or fancy quotes, don’t mix well inside code, so if someone copies and pastes your code with smart quotes, they have to tweak the code they want to use. Which I think everyone will agree is a waste of time. More information and the download are available on the CodeQuote page. Please send me your feedback; I definitely need to know about situations where other characters inside code are being “fixed” by WordPress.
Update: 4:42pm I’ve already made several bug fixes to CodeQuote. Things like less than symbols apparently are now working correctly. And it doesn’t matter if you have a blank line in front of the open code tag. Let me know if you see any other weirdness. I’ll need to see the code you’re entering into a post so I can experiment on it here.