Comment by chrismorgan
3 years ago
They are only mildly similar in appearance, and they have wildly different uses and purposes, all attested for hundreds of years. Unification would very obviously be a terrible idea. ASCII unified these and more for technical reasons, and it meant that nuance or correctness was occasionally lost, people doubled and/or tripled the character to make dashes, and the results were just plain ugly.
Look, even that HYPHEN-MINUS unification that ASCII foisted on us is problematic without considering dashes, because HYPHEN and MINUS SIGN were often fairly different in appearance, and still should normally be at least somewhat different, even after a few decades of misuse due to the bad unification. A hyphen is much shorter, typically lower-placed, and in serif fonts often slanted (the left end lower than the right), whereas the minus sign is the horizontal half of a plus sign.
> Unification would very obviously be a terrible idea
Why? In the entirety of my school education I never heard a mention that different kinds of dashes exist at all and I still have no idea what their individual purposes are, yet it never had any impact on my understanding of text. Maybe I'm overlooking something, but if people have no problems with reading/writing despite "decades of misuse due to the bad unification", then it's not so obvious to me how unification is such a bad idea.
They’re both drawn and used differently. Just because you can error-correct (and may not even know the difference—though I’d honestly expect almost all native English readers to at least recognise some difference between a hyphen and a dash) doesn’t make it right. It’d be similar to unifying 0 and O (which is likewise something that has been done before in some situations for technical reasons).
> They’re both drawn and used differently
That's still not an explanation for why unifying them is bad. Most handwritten text has more variation in every single symbol than the printed dash vs. hyphen. I don't think anyone able to comprehend written text has trouble with that.
> It’d be similar to unifying 0 and O
Which similarly has no noteworthy impact on text readability because digits and letters aren't mixed in English words. Look at a single handwritten dash or zero without context and you won't be able to tell for any of the two whether it's a dash/hyphen or 0/O. And yet that's been good enough in practice for centuries.
To me your argument sounds more like a spaces vs. tabs debate - yes, technically a tab has a different meaning and usually a different length, but in reality it's completely irrelevant when readability of code is concerned.
The unification of minus, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash is entirely natural. Back when I was in school ~25 years ago, in newly-non-communist Romania where ASCII was at best a distant idea, no one taught any difference between these signs. We did have different names for the minus sign and the dash used in writing (and Romanian uses a lot of dashes), but that's it.
We were taught to use the exact same sign for compound words, for other Romanian orthography, for separating words at the end of a line, and as one option for introducing parenthetical clauses - like this. And it was the same sign we used for minus in math class. A slightly longer dash was often used for one particular purpose*, though even that was not explicitly stated, and you wouldn't get lower marks even in calligraphy classes for using shorter dashes instead.
* Romanian uses these longer dashes when representing lines of dialogue, especially in literature, as in:
-- I would like to go to the mall.
-- That sounds wonderful!
The typographical distinction between a minus, minus-hyphen, hyphen, and en-dash can still be helpful to screen reader software: https://www.csun.edu/it/news/accessibility-tip-dashes-and-hy..., https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conve...
Some screen readers are better at parsing this than others, but if there's a typographical option that's more specific, it's typically appreciated.
On the other side of it, the suggestion in the article to use dashes for numeric ranges isn't ideal for parsing.
> The unification of minus, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash is entirely natural.
Maybe in Romanian, I can't comment on that.
In English, we have three different words in common usage: hyphen, dash and minus.
No-one – including school-children – would write no—one or school—children. You might get −1 for that.
> * Romanian uses these longer dashes when representing lines of dialogue, especially in literature, as in:
I've seen that in English literature. Jeff Noon's Needle in the Groove uses that style IIRC.