> 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 hyph

> 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'.