Comment by xeonmc
3 years ago
What about using tilde for numeric ranges?
"The global conflict spanning the years 1939~1945 is known as World War 2..."
3 years ago
What about using tilde for numeric ranges?
"The global conflict spanning the years 1939~1945 is known as World War 2..."
Tilde is already used for approximation though.
The sentence as you wrote it could be misinterpreted as "the conflict spanning the years 1939 to ca. 1945...".
Had you used a dash/hyphen/minus/whatever nobody would be likely to misinterpret that as "the conflict spanning the years minus six..."
No, ≈ is used for approximation, ~ is just the most similar ASCII character, and it became ingrained by people used to using old computers. Just like * is not a multiplication sign, but × is.
In other words, tilde is used for approximation just like the asterisk is used for multiplication and “literally” is used figuratively. We can argue over those uses being correct or incorrect, but they are used like that.
Thus I agree that using tilde for numeric ranges would be confusing. Might as well just use a hyphen, which is easier to type and most people won’t notice the difference from the correct character (en-dash).
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No, they were right—languages change and a single tilde (~) definitely means approximately: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde
Most people associate a double tilde with “approximately equal”.
The asterisk is an approximation of dot, not a replacement for x. They just mean the same thing on scalars.
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At this point I actually handwrite an asterisk to denote multiplication. If I think about it I know it's "wrong", but I do it anyways.
¿But which tilde? I'm a fan of typographical abuse of the ⁓ swung dash myself.
Ohh yes, reducing the amount of tasks the hyphen is used for helps as well