> There’s no point using latex if your book has almost no formulas...

In a book one often needs to keep track of local references (to figures, tables, sections, etc). How this could be reasonably done in markdown flavors?

Asciidoc already supports that. You don’t even need to differentiate in the syntax, it knows when you are referring to a table, a figure, a section, code listing, etc.

And in reStructuredText you can make any place in your document a "source" and any place a "sink" of a reference. Is it the same in AsciiDoc, or are only special things like listings etc. referencable?