bigiain 2 days ago

That would false positive me. I have used double dashes to delimit quote attribution for decades.

Like this:

"You can't believe everything you read on the internet." -- Abraham Lincoln, personal correspondence, 1863

  • dragonwriter 2 days ago

    That's literally a standard use of em-dash being approximated by a double hyphen, though.

gblargg 2 days ago

Does AI use double hyphens? I thought the point was to find who wasn't AI that used proper em dashes.

  • jader201 2 days ago

    Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes, because iOS/macOS translates double dashes to em dashes.

    I think there may be a way to disable this, but I don’t care enough to bother.

    If people want to think my posts are AI generated, oh well.

    • JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

      > Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes

      It depends if you put the space before and after the dashes--that, to be clear, are meant to be there--or if you don't.

      • fragmede 2 days ago

        What, no love for our friend the en-dash?

        - vs – vs —

      • oniony 2 days ago

        I cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.

    • teiferer 2 days ago

      There is also the difference in using space around em-dashes.

venturecruelty 2 days ago

Oof, I feel like you'll accidentally capture a lot of getopt_long() fans. ;)

  • Kinrany 2 days ago

    Excluding those with asymmetrical whitespace around might be enough

SoftTalker 2 days ago

Double-hyphen is an en-dash. Triple-hyphen is an em-dash.

  • dragonwriter 2 days ago

    Double hyphen is replaced in some software with an en-dash (and in those, a triple hyphen is often replaced with an em-dash), and in some with an em-dash; its usually used (other than as input to one of those pieces of software) in places where an em-dash would be appropriate, but in contexts where both an em-dash set closed and an en-dash set open might be used, it is often set open.

    So, it’s not unambiguously s substitute for either is essentially its own punctuation mark used in ASCII-only environments with some influence from both the use of em-dashed and that of en-dashes in more formal environments.