John W. Kennedy wrote:
No, it's a hyphen.
U+002D (hyphen/minus) short U+2010 (true hyphen) short U+2011 (non-breaking hyphen) short U+2012 (en-dash) long U+2013 (em-dash) longer U+2014 (horizontal bar) longest U+2212 (true minus) short
Okay. So answer me, truthfully, just between you and me and some of our closest friends... :)
If I were to present to you a piece of paper with the hyphen/minus, true hyphen, non-breaking hyphen, and true minus printed out, could you distinguish them from each other?
That would depend on the font. I have certainly seen typeset mathematical work where the minus sign looks very unlike a hyphen.
Just as with quotation marks, Unicode is trying to undo confusion introduced by cost-saving measures applied to Victorian typewriters. (I have seen people -- usually in their late 50's or older -- who will, if not stopped, use lower-case "L" instead of the digit "one" and sometimes even upper-case "O" instead of digit "zero".)
Other than the difference between breaking and non-breaking I don't really see the point. Or is it about the computer being able to tell the difference for search-and-replace, etc.?
In the case of the non-breaking hyphen, yes.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has become full of /Pooh./"
-- Frederick Crews. "Postmodern Pooh", Preface
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