I wonder how many em dashes are real vs interpreted.

I love an em-dash, but I have never typed one on purpose; they are all just two minus in a row and I use them wrong -- with a space around (*inspect source to see that lemmy translates for me). I abuse them like I abuse semicolons. They are a typographical tick that indicates a pause or pivot when I translate my thoughts to text.

I can imagine a human manuscript editor turning punctuation like a comma into an em-dash when it makes sense, but I can't imagine a developer ever specifically typing out one -- with the need to either know or look up the unicode for it. The only relevant place would be a comment, but even then IDE's are not generally known for their tendency to replace typed characters with something else.

Maybe some tool in the pretty-print/code-formatter ecosystem added that as a feature? But var-- is so common that I can't imagine that'd be a good idea, even in a comment.