As a speaker of the dialect of British English current in southern
England I think:
1 - the generic term for all three is brackets. As a child I was taught
the precedence rules for arithmetic operators by the mnemonic BODMAS
(the O stands for 'of')
2 - careful speakers of the dialect who know all three use exactly the
terms used in the canton of Zuerich by Martin as he uses them
3 - I would use square brackets and curly brackets to a non-technical
audience but I could not bring myself to say round brackets
On 16/12/2015 15:34, Hadley Wickham wrote:
On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 9:55 AM, Martin Maechler
<maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
[............]
> You are missing the closing bracket on the boxplot()
> command. Just finish with a ')'
Hmm... I once learned
'()' =: parenthesis/es
'[]' =: bracket(s)
'{}' =: brace(s)
Of course, I'm not a native English speaker, and my teacher(s) /
teaching material may have been biased ... but, as all three
symbol pairs play an important role in R, I think it would be
really really helpful, if we could agree on using the same
precise English here.
I'm happy to re-learn, but I'd really like to end up with three
different simple English words, if possible.
(Yes, I know and have seen/heard "curly braces", "round
parentheses", ... but I'd hope we can do without the extra adjective.)
I think this is what Americans are taught, but I can never remember
which is which. I use round brackets, square brackets, and squiggly
brackets, which are memorable, and even if you're not familiar with
the terms you can easily understand what I mean.
Hadley
--
Michael
http://www.dewey.myzen.co.uk/home.html
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