Code tag / escape character?

I see technical computer questions fairly frequently on Fluther. These are the ones I’m most likely to attempt to answer.
Textile makes it really hard to answer properly in many cases. For example, I recently tried to show someone an Apache directive with a leading dash. This led to the rest of the answer being stricken-out.
It would be great if the code tag helped with this, but I have found that it does not:

unix-command—long-option
is an example. There’s supposed to be a space and two short dashes there, not one long dash with no space. A code tag that formats is not very useful IMO.

It would be good if there were some escape character that could be used to prevent Textile from making formatting decisions for us.