[Python-Dev] Dash (original) (raw)

Richard Oudkerk shibturn at gmail.com
Thu Jul 18 21:16:01 CEST 2013

On 18/07/2013 7:55pm, Guido van Rossum wrote:

This may well be a relic from times when in typewritten text there were really only two types of dashes: a short one, typed as a hyphen, used for both hyphen and en-dash (and minus sign), and a long one, typed as two hyphens, used for em-dash.

I suspect at some point the conversion to HTML or typeset text changed so that two hyphens mean en-dash and three mean em-dash, and few people noticed (and nobody really wants to type three hyphens except for a handful of typographical nuts).

Weren't the docs originally done LaTeX? In LaTeX "--" is also an en-dash and "---" is an em-dash.

-- Richard

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