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They meant “more appropriate [than an em dash]”. And that minus sign usage of hyphen-minus isn’t unique in Unicode either – see U+2212 MINUS SIGN.

• ajross 6mo ago
  But... it's not more appropriate than an em dash for representing command line arguments? I don't see how either is any more incorrect than the other. There's a uniquely correct answer here and the em-dash is not it. Period.
  • minitech 6mo ago
    It’s about the top-level comment’s horror that ”--” was substituted with “an en dash, not even an em dash”. If you’re picking a substitution for “--”, en dash makes more sense. The comment you originally replied to had already agreed “that it should be left as a double hyphen”.
    • ajross 6mo ago
      > If you’re picking a substitution for “--”, en dash makes more sense. No, it doesn't? This seems like crazy talk to me, like "If you're picking a substitute for saffron, blood plasma makes more sense than monocrystalline silicon". Like, what? It makes zero sense to substitute this at all. It's exactly what it says it is, the "--hard" command line option to "git reset", and you write it in exactly one way.
      • minitech 6mo ago
        Nobody is confused or disagrees about the `--hard` part. It was a minor tangent about contexts where these ASCII substitutions are established, like LaTeX (`` -> “, '' -> ”, -- -> –, --- -> —, etc.)