This is lots of help to me.

all it takes is a fixed width and overflow: auto; to make it look right, and do what it’s supposed to.

(the textarea tag will break the wordpress post page, since the post area itself is a textarea)

semantics FTW.

The textarea html tag has a specific use for comments and forms. Using it within your post content area is an improper use and can cause problems.

However, the <code> tag is another way to write code in pages that does allow some wrapping, as long as a space appears in the code. Without it, it just keeps on going until it encounters a space, just like text. It really is a tag that turns text into code looking text but acts like text.