[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

There's a lot more to the story, yes. It turns out he was hard coding a minus sign in place of a hyphen.
http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/1...emicolon-next/

The BBC article suggests that he was actually using an em dash instead of a hyphen. If that really is the case, that's pretty horrible formatting, and needs to be corrected.