I've removed the automatic substitution of – and — for
hyphen sequences from 1.5, as it seems to simply cause a neverending
sequence of breakage of links and markup. The special cases that were
added to try to keep it from breaking (some) links and (some) markup of
course made it behave fairly inconsistently, and on the whole it seems
to have been causing trouble far outweighing the utility of making some
dashes slightly more attractive.
Perhaps some future parser that operates in a clean fashion instead of
layering regexes on top of each other will be able to do this in a
consistent, non-breaking manner. For now it doesn't seem worth it.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)