Comment by alpaca128
3 years ago
> 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.