They call them smart hyphens because someone is guarantied to smart when they are covertly used. A gentleman name Dante wrote a comedy about people who deploy such code. It's as bad as the auto-defect code that automatically and silently changes correct words to incorrect, and ludicrous, words. PARM=‘ parameter’ anybody?
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Paul Gilmartin [0000000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu] Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 3:44 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Smart hyphens smart! In https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.2.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r2.bpxa500/r4paxsh.htm each option is shown as being introduced by an en-dash, x'e2 80 93' rather than the corrct hyphen, x'2d'. This is a disservice to programmers who choose to copy-and-paste code from the reference materials to commands they are composing. In my case, I was frustrated when I tried "Find in Page" for "-c" only to discover it needs to be "–c" (en-dash rather than hyphen.) The similar appearance is inexcusably deceptive. RCF submitted. The problem does not appear in the PDF. This may be worse than smart quotes, the bane of copy-and-paste code examples, because the appearance is more similar. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
