Joel is a great guy who apparently loves the em dash. Personally, I find them particularly annoying, pedantic, and always have. Just use a comma, when I'm reading something with an em dash it's always unclear to me exactly how long I should pause, especially when reading aloud..., how dramatic...?!
I use a plugin[1] on my blog that automatically translates ‘--‘ or ‘---‘ into em or en dashes. I did not see it coming that now my articles will look AI-written :p
Edit: just discovered iOS keyboard input also does this when you type multiple hyphens
a short dash - with spaces around it - is clearly a punction mark, not a word-joiner. what nonsense! anyway, you can not expect everyone to use 4 or more different key combinations depending what style they want. the only solution is to make firefox, word, etc choose the right dash for word-joining, punctuation, minus, number ranges, etc. somewhat similar to how they can choose the width of spaces in justified text.
> a short dash - with spaces around it - is clearly a punction mark, not a word-joiner. what nonsense!
That's not a "short dash", it is a hyphen with spaces around it (more precisely, an ASCII hyphen-minus, but that's really a hyphen that is overloaded in contexts where a proper typographic minus sign isn't available.) There are shorter dashes than the em-dash, one of which (the en-dash) is the normal print alternative for some uses of the em-dash, set open (with spaces) where the em-dash would be set closed (without spaces).
Also, both hyphens and en-dashes are used as word joiners in different contexts; this is not distinct from punctuation but a form of punctuation.
> anyway, you can not expect everyone to use 4 or more different key combinations depending what style they want.
For very informal writing, sure, people are often, according to their own personal comfort, going to be sloppy and approximate punctuation (heck, they are going to do that with spelling quite often.)
> the only solution is to make firefox, word, etc choose the right dash for word-joining, punctuation, minus, number ranges, etc.
Some apps have tools that automatically handle simple cases, but...it's not simple for software to figure out what your intent is and subsitute the correct punctuation mark (the are all punctuation). The actual solution is, as for other less common punctuation marks to accept that there's going to be lots of variation and substitution of easier-to-access characters in informal writing, while recognizing what is correct and maintaining it in formal contexts. But also recognizing that people that know what they are doing and know their tools are going to often use the correct ones in informal contexts, as well.
it is a dash. you could use an em dash - or a 2em dash - but this dash is probably shorter than 1em - unless like me you have a monospace font. if it can be a hyphen-minus, it can be a hyphen/minus/dash. and that is what it is, because that is how it is used, ASCII be damned. the english language and its typography is beholden to neither ASCII™ nor UNICODE™.
The hypen/minus/<various dashes> distinction long predates ASCII (much less Unicode), conflation between them is a product of ASCII with some contribution from the limitations of mechanical typewriters, the distinction isn't an imposition from ASCII onto the English language.
Joel is a great guy who apparently loves the em dash. Personally, I find them particularly annoying, pedantic, and always have. Just use a comma, when I'm reading something with an em dash it's always unclear to me exactly how long I should pause, especially when reading aloud..., how dramatic...?!
I use a plugin[1] on my blog that automatically translates ‘--‘ or ‘---‘ into em or en dashes. I did not see it coming that now my articles will look AI-written :p
Edit: just discovered iOS keyboard input also does this when you type multiple hyphens
1 - https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/
a short dash - with spaces around it - is clearly a punction mark, not a word-joiner. what nonsense! anyway, you can not expect everyone to use 4 or more different key combinations depending what style they want. the only solution is to make firefox, word, etc choose the right dash for word-joining, punctuation, minus, number ranges, etc. somewhat similar to how they can choose the width of spaces in justified text.
> a short dash - with spaces around it - is clearly a punction mark, not a word-joiner. what nonsense!
That's not a "short dash", it is a hyphen with spaces around it (more precisely, an ASCII hyphen-minus, but that's really a hyphen that is overloaded in contexts where a proper typographic minus sign isn't available.) There are shorter dashes than the em-dash, one of which (the en-dash) is the normal print alternative for some uses of the em-dash, set open (with spaces) where the em-dash would be set closed (without spaces).
Also, both hyphens and en-dashes are used as word joiners in different contexts; this is not distinct from punctuation but a form of punctuation.
> anyway, you can not expect everyone to use 4 or more different key combinations depending what style they want.
For very informal writing, sure, people are often, according to their own personal comfort, going to be sloppy and approximate punctuation (heck, they are going to do that with spelling quite often.)
> the only solution is to make firefox, word, etc choose the right dash for word-joining, punctuation, minus, number ranges, etc.
Some apps have tools that automatically handle simple cases, but...it's not simple for software to figure out what your intent is and subsitute the correct punctuation mark (the are all punctuation). The actual solution is, as for other less common punctuation marks to accept that there's going to be lots of variation and substitution of easier-to-access characters in informal writing, while recognizing what is correct and maintaining it in formal contexts. But also recognizing that people that know what they are doing and know their tools are going to often use the correct ones in informal contexts, as well.
it is a dash. you could use an em dash - or a 2em dash - but this dash is probably shorter than 1em - unless like me you have a monospace font. if it can be a hyphen-minus, it can be a hyphen/minus/dash. and that is what it is, because that is how it is used, ASCII be damned. the english language and its typography is beholden to neither ASCII™ nor UNICODE™.
The hypen/minus/<various dashes> distinction long predates ASCII (much less Unicode), conflation between them is a product of ASCII with some contribution from the limitations of mechanical typewriters, the distinction isn't an imposition from ASCII onto the English language.
Yeah I never used them before I worked at the FSF. The FSF used the Chicago Manual of Style.