From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Wed Mar 09 2011 - 00:02:08 CST
Shawn Steele wrote:
> USPS zip+4 lookup software certainly isn't going to be expecting
> anything other than ASCII hyphen-minus. (A friend used to work in
> that field). If you're zip+4 has any chance of escaping into mailing
> software I'd avoid anything else.
Even if you intend to use the codes in print media, so that people just
cannot copy the data as coded characters, I would stick to HYPHEN-MINUS in
cases like this. The organizations that defined such code systems may have
given no thought to the identity of hyphens, but if they had analysed the
issue, the answer would most probably have been that the hyphen is the
character that people commonly use as hyphen when typing on a typewriter or
compuer terminal. And HYPHEN-MINUS is the character that has been used over
and over again when typing in such codes.
This implies that the hyphen in a zip code may look somewhat different than
word hyphen, in typeset publications (since HYPHEN can look different from
HYPHEN-MINUS in the same font, and typographically speaking it should, since
HYPHEN should be fairly short whereas HYPHEN-MINUS should, and normally
does, reflect its dual role). I would say that this is just how things
should be, just like a HYPHEN in a program code sample need not (and
preferably should not) look the same as word hyphen in natural-language
texts.
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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