That's still not an explanation for why unifying them is bad. Most handwritten text has more variation in every single symbol than the printed dash vs. hyphen. I don't think anyone able to comprehend written text has trouble with that.
> It’d be similar to unifying 0 and O
Which similarly has no noteworthy impact on text readability because digits and letters aren't mixed in English words. Look at a single handwritten dash or zero without context and you won't be able to tell for any of the two whether it's a dash/hyphen or 0/O. And yet that's been good enough in practice for centuries.
To me your argument sounds more like a spaces vs. tabs debate - yes, technically a tab has a different meaning and usually a different length, but in reality it's completely irrelevant when readability of code is concerned.
That's still not an explanation for why unifying them is bad. Most handwritten text has more variation in every single symbol than the printed dash vs. hyphen. I don't think anyone able to comprehend written text has trouble with that.
> It’d be similar to unifying 0 and O
Which similarly has no noteworthy impact on text readability because digits and letters aren't mixed in English words. Look at a single handwritten dash or zero without context and you won't be able to tell for any of the two whether it's a dash/hyphen or 0/O. And yet that's been good enough in practice for centuries.
To me your argument sounds more like a spaces vs. tabs debate - yes, technically a tab has a different meaning and usually a different length, but in reality it's completely irrelevant when readability of code is concerned.