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Does anyone here know of any actual Unicode-encoded documents that consistently use U+2010 HYPHEN for their hyphens? Among those documents that do distinguish

Does anyone here know of any actual Unicode-encoded documents that consistently use U+2010 HYPHEN for their hyphens? Among those documents that do distinguish between dash-like characters, the most common usage I've seen is to use U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS for hyphens and U+2212 MINUS SIGN for minus signs, alongside the rest of U+2013 EN-DASH, U+2014 EM-DASH, etc. U+2010 seems conspicuously absent from everything, even when the 'proper' character usage is otherwise adhered to.

mjevans 2y ago
If you ever find any, it might be time to ask if a true General AI has been developed. I really doubt most humans bother, and LLMs will copy our mistakes.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  My point is, there are penty of documents which bother with minus signs, en-dashes, and em-dashes, including Wikipedia, the Unicode Standard itself, and well-edited online news articles. Yet they still don't bother with U+2010 in particular, which makes me question the character's usefulness.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    U+2010 has the advantage that it is not ambiguous and its appearance is predictable. You can never know whether a given typeface will display U+002D as a hyphen or as a minus or en-dash. The reason why it is seldom used is that all keyboards by default provide only a way to easily type U+002D and the other ASCII characters. The input methods may provide some combination of keys that allows you to enter a minus or an en-dash, but nobody bothers to add an additional key combination for U+2010. The U+002D key could be reconfigured to output U+2010, but this would annoy the programmers who use programming languages where U+002D is used for minus. So there is no way out of this mess. In programming languages or spreadsheets U+002D is used for minus, while in documents intended for reading, U+002D is used for hyphen, and the appropriate Unicode characters are used for minus and en-dash. An exception among programming languages was COBOL. Originally it used only a hyphen character, which was used to improve the readability of long identifiers. This was possible because the arithmetic operations were written with words, i.e. SUBTRACT, so there was no need for a minus character. A few years later (1964-12), when the PL/I language was developed to replace both FORTRAN and COBOL, they have introduced the underscore character, replacing the hyphen in long identifiers, where it was used to improve their readability like in COBOL, so that the hyphen/minus character could be used with the meaning of minus, like in FORTRAN. This convention has been inherited by most later programming languages, except by most dialects of LISP, which typically use a hyphen character in identifiers and they do not use a minus character, except for the sign of numbers.
    - LegionMammal978 2y ago
      > U+2010 has the advantage that it is not ambiguous and its appearance is predictable. You can never know whether a given typeface will display U+002D as a hyphen or as a minus or en-dash. The thing is, I've never found a single non-monospace typeface that displays U+002D as a minus sign or en-dash: it seems to be universally rendered shorter than a U+2212 or U+2013, whenever the latter have their own glyphs in the first place. I also did some testing on my system some time back, and 99% or more of typefaces treated a U+2010 identically to a U+002D. Only one or two displayed it a smidgeon shorter than a U+002D. Hence my original question about whether it really is used for that purpose (or any other purpose) in practice. Meanwhile, you do make a good point regarding programming languages. Though it would seem mostly coincidental to me that their use cases are almost always 'hyphen' or 'minus', as opposed to any of the other meanings of a 'typewriter dash'.
    - lispm 2y ago
      > except by most dialects of LISP, which typically use a hyphen character in identifiers and they do not use a minus character, except for the sign of numbers. In Common Lisp, there is one character SP10 for Hyphen and Minus: https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_ac.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_ac... It is used * in numbers as a sign -> -42 * in a conditional read macro as a minus operator -> #-ARM64(error "This is no 64bit ARM platform") * in functions as a numeric minus operator -> (- 100 2/3) or (1- 100) * as a global variable for the currently evaluated REPL expression -> - * as a hyphen for symbols (incl. identifiers) -> UPDATE-INSTANCE-FOR-DIFFERENT-CLASS
  - keybored 2y ago
    For people/text authors who care, hyphen-minus is already hyphen-biased: most hyphen-minuses you encounter from average text authors (who don’t care) are meant to be hyphens. And for people who care it is even more slanted: - They will either use `--` or `---` as poor man’s en/em-dash or use the proper symbols - They might use the proper minus sign but even if they don’t: post-processing can guess what is meant as “minus” in basic contexts (and even for math-heavy contexts: hyphens aren’t that common) Furthermore hyphen-minus is rendered as a hyphen already. Not as minus or a dash. It’s like a process of elimination: people who care already treat non-hyphens sufficiently different such that the usage of hyphen-minus is clear: it is just hyphen. For me these things is mostly about looks and author-intent. Dashes look better than poor man’s dashes. Hyphen-minus looks like a hyphen minus already. And if I use hyphen-minus then I mean hyphen. And for me it is less about using the correct character at the expense of possible inter-operation: the hyphen-minus is so widespread that I have no idea if 95% of software will even cope with using the real HYPHEN Unicode scalar. (I very much doubt that!) The last thing is keyboard usability economics. I use en-dash/em-dash a few times per paragraph at most. Hyphens can occur several times a sentence. And since I need hyphen-minus as well (see previous point about interoperability) most keyboard setups will probably need to relegate it to some modifier keybind like AltGr-something… and no one has the patience for typing such a common symbol with a modifier combo.
lifthrasiir 2y ago
I too haven't seen any natural use of U+2010. But some Unicode characters are equally underused, often because they are historical or designed for specialized or internal uses. Here U+2010 can be thought as a normalized form for U+002D after some processing to filter non-hyphens, which justifies its inclusion even when the character itself might not be used much.
red_admiral 2y ago
TeX definitely distinguishes between -, -- and --- in text mode (hyphen, en dash, em dash); there are packages for language-specific quotes and hyphenation rules so there may be something out there that does this - ctan/smartmn specifically seems to be dealing with this kind of thing. Mind you, TeX also allows pretty arbitrary remapping of symbols.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  Of course TeX also distinguishes between its dash-like characters. But I'm not talking about TeX but about Unicode, which is the one with the apparently-unused U+2010 HYPHEN.
tracker1 2y ago
It will depend on the source for the input. Odds are every variation of minus and hyphen has appeared in every context at some point. From a stylistic perspective, it may have been desired for a given appearance even if technically wrong. Just because of a given typeface. I say this as someone who was an artist before learning software programming.

mjevans 2y ago

If you ever find any, it might be time to ask if a true General AI has been developed. I really doubt most humans bother, and LLMs will copy our mistakes.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
My point is, there are penty of documents which bother with minus signs, en-dashes, and em-dashes, including Wikipedia, the Unicode Standard itself, and well-edited online news articles. Yet they still don't bother with U+2010 in particular, which makes me question the character's usefulness.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  U+2010 has the advantage that it is not ambiguous and its appearance is predictable. You can never know whether a given typeface will display U+002D as a hyphen or as a minus or en-dash. The reason why it is seldom used is that all keyboards by default provide only a way to easily type U+002D and the other ASCII characters. The input methods may provide some combination of keys that allows you to enter a minus or an en-dash, but nobody bothers to add an additional key combination for U+2010. The U+002D key could be reconfigured to output U+2010, but this would annoy the programmers who use programming languages where U+002D is used for minus. So there is no way out of this mess. In programming languages or spreadsheets U+002D is used for minus, while in documents intended for reading, U+002D is used for hyphen, and the appropriate Unicode characters are used for minus and en-dash. An exception among programming languages was COBOL. Originally it used only a hyphen character, which was used to improve the readability of long identifiers. This was possible because the arithmetic operations were written with words, i.e. SUBTRACT, so there was no need for a minus character. A few years later (1964-12), when the PL/I language was developed to replace both FORTRAN and COBOL, they have introduced the underscore character, replacing the hyphen in long identifiers, where it was used to improve their readability like in COBOL, so that the hyphen/minus character could be used with the meaning of minus, like in FORTRAN. This convention has been inherited by most later programming languages, except by most dialects of LISP, which typically use a hyphen character in identifiers and they do not use a minus character, except for the sign of numbers.
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    > U+2010 has the advantage that it is not ambiguous and its appearance is predictable. You can never know whether a given typeface will display U+002D as a hyphen or as a minus or en-dash. The thing is, I've never found a single non-monospace typeface that displays U+002D as a minus sign or en-dash: it seems to be universally rendered shorter than a U+2212 or U+2013, whenever the latter have their own glyphs in the first place. I also did some testing on my system some time back, and 99% or more of typefaces treated a U+2010 identically to a U+002D. Only one or two displayed it a smidgeon shorter than a U+002D. Hence my original question about whether it really is used for that purpose (or any other purpose) in practice. Meanwhile, you do make a good point regarding programming languages. Though it would seem mostly coincidental to me that their use cases are almost always 'hyphen' or 'minus', as opposed to any of the other meanings of a 'typewriter dash'.
  - lispm 2y ago
    > except by most dialects of LISP, which typically use a hyphen character in identifiers and they do not use a minus character, except for the sign of numbers. In Common Lisp, there is one character SP10 for Hyphen and Minus: https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_ac.htm https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_ac... It is used * in numbers as a sign -> -42 * in a conditional read macro as a minus operator -> #-ARM64(error "This is no 64bit ARM platform") * in functions as a numeric minus operator -> (- 100 2/3) or (1- 100) * as a global variable for the currently evaluated REPL expression -> - * as a hyphen for symbols (incl. identifiers) -> UPDATE-INSTANCE-FOR-DIFFERENT-CLASS
- keybored 2y ago
  For people/text authors who care, hyphen-minus is already hyphen-biased: most hyphen-minuses you encounter from average text authors (who don’t care) are meant to be hyphens. And for people who care it is even more slanted: - They will either use `--` or `---` as poor man’s en/em-dash or use the proper symbols - They might use the proper minus sign but even if they don’t: post-processing can guess what is meant as “minus” in basic contexts (and even for math-heavy contexts: hyphens aren’t that common) Furthermore hyphen-minus is rendered as a hyphen already. Not as minus or a dash. It’s like a process of elimination: people who care already treat non-hyphens sufficiently different such that the usage of hyphen-minus is clear: it is just hyphen. For me these things is mostly about looks and author-intent. Dashes look better than poor man’s dashes. Hyphen-minus looks like a hyphen minus already. And if I use hyphen-minus then I mean hyphen. And for me it is less about using the correct character at the expense of possible inter-operation: the hyphen-minus is so widespread that I have no idea if 95% of software will even cope with using the real HYPHEN Unicode scalar. (I very much doubt that!) The last thing is keyboard usability economics. I use en-dash/em-dash a few times per paragraph at most. Hyphens can occur several times a sentence. And since I need hyphen-minus as well (see previous point about interoperability) most keyboard setups will probably need to relegate it to some modifier keybind like AltGr-something… and no one has the patience for typing such a common symbol with a modifier combo.

lifthrasiir 2y ago

I too haven't seen any natural use of U+2010. But some Unicode characters are equally underused, often because they are historical or designed for specialized or internal uses. Here U+2010 can be thought as a normalized form for U+002D after some processing to filter non-hyphens, which justifies its inclusion even when the character itself might not be used much.

red_admiral 2y ago

TeX definitely distinguishes between -, -- and --- in text mode (hyphen, en dash, em dash); there are packages for language-specific quotes and hyphenation rules so there may be something out there that does this - ctan/smartmn specifically seems to be dealing with this kind of thing. Mind you, TeX also allows pretty arbitrary remapping of symbols.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
Of course TeX also distinguishes between its dash-like characters. But I'm not talking about TeX but about Unicode, which is the one with the apparently-unused U+2010 HYPHEN.

tracker1 2y ago

It will depend on the source for the input. Odds are every variation of minus and hyphen has appeared in every context at some point. From a stylistic perspective, it may have been desired for a given appearance even if technically wrong. Just because of a given typeface. I say this as someone who was an artist before learning software programming.