Hyphen Dash Prime Analysis

Hyphen, Dash, Prime, … It was during the time I was finishing my doctorate studies at Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT), when I received a letter from a professor of The University of Massachusetts (U’Mass), who was at that time also the dean of its College of Arts and Sciences. The letter said that he was quite impressed with my research papers and proposed to invite me as a research associate of his research group. At that time I was planning, if possible, to do my post-doctoral research with a great world-renowned professor at Yale who was the director of the Science Division at Yale, or to apply to the French government to obtain a scholarship for further study in France. However, both of those plans appeared next to impossible even to me. So, I was tempted by his unexpected offer. I wrote him frankly
A staff member of that travel agency did all those procedures for me. Unfortunately, one of the documents was not accepted, and the Embassy staff there kindly suggested that the “-“ of my individual number xxxxx-xxx should be a dash. This was the beginning of my long-lasting tragedy. The staff member prepared the document replacing that symbol to xxxxx’xxx. It was not at all acceptable. After many mail exchanges between the US and Japan, I at last found that the symbol “-“ between the numbers should not be a hyphen but a dash “—“.

There are many similar but different symbols. As examples of such symbols, I am giving below some typical symbols together with their Unicode number (a 16-digit code to define all the letters in the world):

‐ U+2010 (hard) hyphen; used also as minus
(There is also a soft hyphen; U+00AD) – U+2013 EN-dash — U+2014 EM-dash − U+2796 minus sign

′ U+2032 prime (dash) ' U+0027 apostrophe ’ U+2019 right single quotation