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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