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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

It's a command line argument. The undeniably correct way to render it is with two minus signs[1] and absolutely not something non-ascii.

[1] Not strictly a hyphen, which has its own unicode point (0x2010) outside of ascii. Unicode embraced the ambiguity by calling this point (0x2d) "HYPHEN-MINUS" formally, but really its only unique typographic usage is to represent subtraction.

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They meant “more appropriate [than an em dash]”. And that minus sign usage of hyphen-minus isn’t unique in Unicode either – see U+2212 MINUS SIGN.

But... it's not more appropriate than an em dash for representing command line arguments? I don't see how either is any more incorrect than the other. There's a uniquely correct answer here and the em-dash is not it. Period.

It’s about the top-level comment’s horror that ”--” was substituted with “an en dash, not even an em dash”. If you’re picking a substitution for “--”, en dash makes more sense. The comment you originally replied to had already agreed “that it should be left as a double hyphen”.

> If you’re picking a substitution for “--”, en dash makes more sense.

No, it doesn't? This seems like crazy talk to me, like "If you're picking a substitute for saffron, blood plasma makes more sense than monocrystalline silicon". Like, what?

It makes zero sense to substitute this at all. It's exactly what it says it is, the "--hard" command line option to "git reset", and you write it in exactly one way.

Nobody is confused or disagrees about the `--hard` part. It was a minor tangent about contexts where these ASCII substitutions are established, like LaTeX (`` -> “, '' -> ”, -- -> –, --- -> —, etc.)

> The undeniably correct way to render it is with two minus signs[1] and absolutely not something non-ascii.

> [1] Not strictly a hyphen, which has its own unicode point (0x2010) outside of ascii. Unicode embraced the ambiguity by calling this point (0x2d) "HYPHEN-MINUS" formally, but really its only unique typographic usage is to represent subtraction.

Strictly, its as you note, the hyphen-minus, and Unicode has separate, disambiguated code points for both hyphen (0x2010) and minus (0x2212); hyphen-minus has no "unique typographic usage".

I said that badly. What I meant was that ASCII 0x2d is, in fact, used as the only minus sign in basically all markup and presentation layers. (Mostly because math layout tends to go through its own interpreter -- what lives in "the unicode text" is always "markup" of some kind). The unicode value is ignored AFAIK, nothing emits it or interprets it specially. That is not true of the hyphen, which does get special treatment at the presentation layer in fonts and whatnot.

The "sed" expressions that power the title "cleanup" here do overshoot quite often. It ruins --long-command-arguments and it definitely also reuins cpp::namespaces. Quite curious why these obvious shortcomings are not being fixed.

It's not a command line argument, it's part of the title of a hackernews post.

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