After being frustrated that the WordPress blogging system was "eating" his double dashes (like in a ./configure string), Rob Allen went on the offensive and dove into the WordPress code to fix things.

One thing that I've noticed is that whenever I used -- in a post, such as this one, WordPress converted the -- to &emdash; which whilst very pretty doesn't work so well for people trying to understand command line switches. [...] I tracked it down to the wptexturize function in the wp-includes/functions-formatting.php file.

He found and used this plugin (disable_wptexturize) and the issue disappeared.