It is blue because you did not escape the left angle or put the code in a code block.
“left angle a” is interpreted as the beginning of a link.
Link color is blue.
How you did it in your “Actual text” is the proper way to post code.
Or I suppose you could use spaces
if a < b
print “a is less than b!”
elseif b < a
print “b is less than a”