On 01/25/2014 05:14 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:28:09PM -0500, bob gailer wrote:
And please call () parends and [] brackets, and{} braces. Saves a lot of
confusion.
If you think that parentheses are spelt with a "d", you're certainly
confused :-)
They're all brackets. Often the type of bracket doesn't matter, but when
it does, adjectives do a perfectly fine job at distinguishing one from
the other: round brackets, square brackets, and curly brackets are
well-known and in common use all over the Commonwealth, and have been
established since the mid 1700s.
As a sop to Americans, who I understand are easily confused by ordinary
English *wink*, the Unicode consortium describes () as parentheses:
py> unicodedata.name("(")
'LEFT PARENTHESIS'
but [] and {} are described as brackets:
py> unicodedata.name("[")
'LEFT SQUARE BRACKET'
py> unicodedata.name("{")
'LEFT CURLY BRACKET'
As are angle brackets:
py> unicodedata.lookup("LEFT ANGLE BRACKET")
'〈'
py> unicodedata.lookup("RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET")
'〉'
As a foreigner, I noticed that english native speakers use both the series round
/ square / curly / angle brackets, and individual terms parens (no 'd' ;-) /
brackets / braces / chevrons. No major issue, except for 'brackets' which can be
either a collective term or specific to [].
HTML uses ASCII less-than and greater-than signs as angle brackets.
Physicists even have a pun about them, with "bra-ket" notation for
quantum state:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra-ket_notation
funny
There are a number of other types of brackets with more specialised
uses, or common in Asian texts. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket
By the way, the word "bracket" itself is derived from the French and
Spanish words for "codpiece". That's not relevant to anything, I just
thought I'd mention it.
Apparently, according to wiktionary, it may come from an old germanic root
through Gaulish:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bracket#Etymology
<< Etymology
From earlier bragget, probably from Middle French braguette, from Old French
braguette (“the opening in the fore part of a pair of breeches”), from Old
Provençal braga, from Latin brāca (“pants”), from Transalpine Gaulish *brāca
(“pants”), perhaps from or related to similar forms in Germanic: compare Old
English braccas (“pants”), Old English brōc (“breeches”), from
Proto-Indo-European *bʰrāg-, from *bʰreg- (“to break, crack, split, divide”).
More at breech, britches. >>
d
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