Conference thebay::joyoflex

    I vote for " - " , "--" just doesn't look right.
    All other Noters please enter their preference, and in a year's
    time we'll add up the votes to see which wins.  .............Guy

    Personally, I prefer " -- " (using the best element of each
    choice).
    
    --- jerry

    When I took a typing class for secretaries in high school,
    they taught us to use the "--" with no spaces.  But since I
    got into computers, I started doing it the way Jerry does,
    with spaces and two dashes.
    
    If you enter dashes this way in text you plan to process through
    in any kind of formatting program that does line-wrapping, you
    will probably cause the entire unit of "word--word" to be treated
    as a single word, producing some funny-looking results.  If you
    use only one hyphen, it tends to get lost, especially in document,
    which assumes a single hyphen is the very short minus sign.
    
    --bonnie 

    oh, let me dash headlong into this pithy discussion!
    
    I had an English teacher who used to (figuratively) rap our knuckles
    if we dared use the hyphen to append a clause.  The hyphen, she
    declared, was soley to be used to divide a word at the end of a
    sentence if absolutely necessary, or in words spelled with the lit-
    tle (sic) buggers.  She used to gleefully fill any composition submitted 
    with mis-used (sic) hyphens with RED INK.  She felt that the use
    of a hyphen to append or isolate a clause was lazy, perverse and
    worse, it smacked of -- shudder -- advertising copy.
    
    Of course, this was back in prehistory before computers were wrapping
    longish words.  
    

     I vote -- this way.
     
     Dan

      I prefer to render the dash as two consecutive hyphens without
      any surrounding white space.  
      
      The programs which perform word wrapping should be modified to
      break the lines at the dashes--preferably before the initial dash
      and/or after the final one--so that the first and last words in
      the enclosed text are never separated from their punctuation marks
      (just like when parentheses are used). 
      
      Dave C.

yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--
yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--
yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--
yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--
yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--
yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--
yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--
yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--yard--                        

I'd like to know what a "typewruter" is.  Does everyone else who reads this
notesfile know what one is?  I'd assume that they do, since no one has
questioned it yet.

					Larry
					  ~

    Please, for people who use the metric measure, could you translate
    that into metres?   

RE: -2 (Larry)

>< Note 554.8 by CSSE32::MAGOON "Village idiot" >
>I'd like to know what a "typewruter" is.  Does everyone else who reads this

Larry, I think you should have understood. It is the past tense of "typewriter".
It used to be "typewroter", but you know how things go when words get commonly
used nowadays ;^)
I guess what the original user of the word meant was something like: I have used
the typewriter, and now it is broken.

Compare it to the following:

	"I went to see my shrunk"

See what I mean? With a personal name as you have, you must understand ;-);-)

Arie

     I'd go for " - " , but then again I type " , " where everyone else
    types ", " . 
    
    I just like wide open spaces .
    
    John J

    Hooo, what a great idea that nouns should agree in tense with the
    verb! 
    
    Now what would be the difference between I ain't got nobodied and 
    I ain't got no once?   Gives one paws, hey.

    re .4:  Sounds like your teacher didn't know the difference between
    a hyphen and a dash.  Maybe she didn't prefer dashes either--from
    what you said--but what you described was the proper use of hyphens.
    I don't use dashes much these days (I haven't really thought about
    why) but I tend to put parenthetical statements in parentheses,
    or set them off with commas.
    
  --Simon
    

    But, Simon, how can you tell the difference between a dash and a
    hyphen?  To wit:  -   
    
    Is that the portrait of a dash or a hypen?
    
    Further:  ----
    
    Is that a group portrait of a dash family, a hypen family or a mixed
    group?
    
    These are burning questions, indeed.  Perhaps your way is best.
   
     (
    
    That is, without doubt a parenthesis.  Not to be confused with [
    or {.  Ah, clarity.

    In the ASCII code, there's perhaps neither hyphen nor dash.  I think
    what we use for hyphenation is strictly speaking a minus sign,
    computers having been originally computing machines, not word
    processors.   I'll have to admit, though, that I say "minus" for
    "-" only when it precedes a number, "hyphen" only when it's serving
    the function of a hyphen, and, notwithstanding my previous reply, 
    I say "dash" in other contexts.
    
    Hyphens are supposed to be shorter than dashes.  Therefore, in text,
    I would myself use doubled minus signs for a dash, and a single
    minus sign for a hyphen.
    
    Simon
    

    I was wrong.  Typewriters (I used to remember what they looked like)
    were around much longer than computers or terminals, and they too,
    being monospaced devices (all characters having the same width),
    lacked the dash character.
    
    Simon
    

    Another vote--this one for the double-minus digram.  I was taught
    by my high-school typing instructor (not a teacher by any means)
    to do it that way, and that way I'll do it.
    
    Now that a few years have passed, I justify it thusly.  The
    typewriter is (usually) an monospaced device, and the dash is
    supposed to be longer than the hyphen.  Of course, we will have
    to change the word-wrap algorithms of most word processors to
    do it this way with a computer, but that wasn't the original
    question, was it?

I - when typing on a video device - employ the "wide-open spaces" approach.

Like several others here, I was taught in high school typing class (on a 
manual typewriter) to use two hyphens with no spaces.  But I was taught an
additional step:  after typing the second hyphen, push down the backspace
key and _hold_it_down_ while pushing the hyphen key yet a third time. The
backspace key (again, on a manual) moves the carriage back more than a
character width when fully depressed, and returns to the exact character
position only when released.  Thus this technique yields an unbroken,
double-width hyphen, i.e. a dash. 

This technique would yield humorous results on an electric typewriter or 
computer keyboard.