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Comment by appointment | Hacker News Reader

em-dashes and en-dashes are used for completely different purposes, so why would they be confused?

En-dashes, set off with spaces, are an acceptable substitute for unspaced em-dashes in some style guides. See for example this Canadian government guide: https://nos-langues.canada.ca/en/writing-tips-plus/en-dash.

The use seems to be more common in British than in American English.

I would think to most people, (myself included!), it's just a 'dash'. A sentence was written with a dash - you could just ingest and read past it, like a comma.

Not saying this is accurate usage, maybe just real world usage.

I would hope most people can distinguish between the really short dash and the longer forms, even if they don't know any of the rules around them. But n versus m I don't expect people to notice.

I’m not sure I’m representative of “most people” in this respect (I have always used both n and m dashes), but I personally find the difference between n and m dashes bigger and more noticeable than the difference between regular and n dashes.

Because most people are ESL and really don't care.

I didn't even know there are multiple types of dashes.

I did know about multiple types of quotes because they kept breaking code on blogs. Still didn't care, but at least I learned how to spot and fix them.

Really looking forward to having the wrong kind of dash in code, but at least with current tech that seems like it won't happen.

Why wouldn't they. Never studied them. Never even thought twice about the dashes in a sentence. Didn't realize they were different till like a few months ago when everybody suddenly started focusing on how "AI" it makes everything look

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