Why anyone would opt for more byzantine words with more nuanced definitions and rich history of usage, tradition, and cultural value is beyond me. After all, the number of combinations of a thousand words in sentences of arbitrary length is enormous. Perhaps we should simplify to one of the several published standards of simplified English. While we are at it, we have so many words. Context is, of course, a great disambiguator, so I see no reason to use any statement terminator besides a period. Colons of any level of completion merely separate clauses, a task more than thoroughly covered by commas and periods. After all, we have the single quote, which consumes half as many valuable pixels and does just as good a job of indicating quotation. I am a bit upset at your use of double quotes above. Then certainly we should remove those superfluous brackets. Why anyone would opt for more byzantine characters with more rules on top is beyond my imagination. We have parenthesis, commas, colons both full and partial, brackets square and curvy, braces, slashes forward and back.More than enough permutations and code space for anyone's expressive needs. The existence of a whole slew of specialized characters, all basically indistinguishable and frankly unheard of to most, has to work hard to justify itself right to live on my keyboard. A minimal set of rules, minimal set of characters, rich in predictable patterns, is what makes for a good language. Not that subtraction and range are ever ambiguous, but if they were just use "#1 - #n" to denote "the numbers 1/n being used as labels for some range of options, not as a numerical values".Īll in all, we have plenty of characters. Machine screw is the only one of these where its even plausible. Obviously you raise e to the power of your screw and you get a rotation rate in the complex plane, and a width of screw in the complex plane as well.Ĭompounding and numerical ops are basically never confused. Eg you could write your machine screws as. There's no shortage of mathematical notation and delimiting characters. If you don't want to use them, I'm almost positive no one is ever going to correct you. Even though I use em-dashes I learned more about how they're helpful. If you don't want to integrate that information into your life, great, but that's not really a refutation. The parent comment is about why the distinction in dashes matters and has virtually nothing to do with typography enthusiasm, but rather reader comprehension. It'd be great if they did, since it makes reading easier and takes almost no additional effort, but I'm not going to let it ruin my day. I also use capitalization and punctuation when I type while many people do not. No one, pedants included, have ever tried to correct me on it. When typing on a web form, I'll usually use "-" because it's visually similar and much easier to type on a US keyboard. When writing documents or HTML I use them because it adds clarity. Then don't use them? As a reader, I certainly appreciate when people do. Otherwise we'd be taking about half and quarter em dashes and the likes. That's the barebones set of dashes that are relevant for a balanced typographical appearance, not made up pedantic complexity to annoy people. And at last, either of them won't preserve optical balance when displaying a numerical range, as numbers are wider than a hyphen, but narrower than an em space, which would result in either insufficient visual separation compared to spaces following said numbers, or too much of an optical gap within an entity that belongs together. In reverse, a shorter dash when switching context - or interjecting another idea within a sentence - doesn't slow the pace of the text flow enough, and your brain will read/intonate it the same way as when linking words. A longer dash to link words that belong together is visually perceived as an interruption and doesn't feel like those two words are one The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-typographic balance: The fact that using different dashes does encode meaning in a subtle sense does have relevance for semantics - but that's, imho, almost secondary to this argument, as it's not as grammatically relevant as commas and. "why are we even kerning fonts, who cares if there's a few gaps when i write »irl«."
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