Chad Perrin wrote:
I suppose I should go look at the bugzilla discussion now. I seem to recall, last time I looked at it, that the endash people were advocating for -- being translated to endashes and --- to emdashes, which seems counterintuitive for both, since endashes are supposed to be shorter than - and emdashes have been represented as -- for so long and in so many contexts that using three dashes will just confuse the heck out of many. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
Wot? En dashes are, by definition, one en long. Hyphens are usually shorter.
Compare: - hyphen – en dash — em dash
The difference may be minor if you're reading this in a monospaced font, but both dashes should still be noticeably longer than the hyphen.
Using -- for en and --- for em dashes seems reasonable to me (that's how TeX does it, IIRC), thought I'd be willing to live with – and --. However, I do believe other languages (German?) tend to use the en dash more than English.