On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Richard Oudkerk <shibt...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
Right -- but I've been typing two hyphens to mean an em-dash all my life. :-) -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
