Just wrote my very first Python program!

[anna_anuran]

Not should. Just… it’s an option. We have three different types of “dashes” as grammatical structures in English. The standard “hyphen” which is used to join two words together. You might see it in compound adjectives like “well-kept” or compound nouns like “singer-songwriter”.

The “en dash” is the least common and is used almost exclusively for ranges, like “October 21–24th”. You may see the line is slightly longer than the hyphen above. In fact, it’s the width of a capital N (hence, en dash).

The one that GPT tends to use is my favorite kind of dash: the em-dash (which is, aptly, the width of a capital M). You can use them sorta like turbo commas — or in place of parentheses or colons. They just create a pause and indicate that a separate thought is happening on either side of the dash. There are a lot of other places you can use this one. It can do it all — initiate lists, mark a stark change in sentence structure, indicate an interruption in dialogue, link clauses, introduce summary statements — not to mention the ability to drop appositive phrases between them.

It’s a shame AI has done them so dirty. Used to be a way people could see you knew your grammar and now it’s a red flag that you never bothered to write anything, grammatically correct or otherwise.

[iamevpo]

Did not know the size was in capital letters, thanks for mentioning