I decided against bringing over this feature of Markdown mostly because I judged that it is clearer and more in the spirit of casual text on a discussion board to include full, visible links. Discussion is not hypertext, and links work better when they stand clearly apart from the text.

And there is HTML mode if you absolutely, positively have to have inline links.

PS: If you are a programmer, >>1, never ever implement any kind of formatting in the way you described. It is a horribly unreliable and insecure.