Last I know, the site used a whitelist approach to strip the unsupported tags or unsupported attributes on tags.
So I think it would be easy to at least let us provide the class attribute for the pre tag (right now, it doesn't). That way, we can manually set the language for the syntax highlighting like this :

<pre class="prettyprint lang-sql"><code>
--sql comment here
</code></pre>

To answer the question ; Yes, it would definitely be worthwhile to provide hints as to what language to use for the syntax highlighting. I mean take a look at ask.sqlservercentral.com, a stackexchange site focused on SQL Server. But none of the code examples are highlighted correctly.

Last I know, the site used a whitelist approach to strip the unsupported tags or unsupported attributes on tags.
So I think it would be easy to at least let us provide the class attribute for the pre tag (right now, it doesn't). That way, we can manually set the language for the syntax highlighting like this :

<pre class="prettyprint lang-sql"><code>
--sql comment here
</code></pre>

To answer the question ; Yes, it would definitely be worthwhile to provide hints as to what language to use for the syntax highlighting. I mean take a look at ask.sqlservercentral.com or ask.sqlteam.com, both of them are stackexchange sites focused on SQL Server. But none of the code examples are highlighted correctly.