On Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:59:32 +0200
David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> That's because parentheses aren't brackets.
>
> () "parentheses"
> [] "brackets"
> {} "curly brackets", occasionally "braces"
> <> "angle brackets"
Absolutely true, from a specialist point of view - but in common usage
(imprecise, yes, even sloppy; but customary, and therefore not wrong)
those are all simply called brackets. This fact is a painful one for
anybody trying to document anything where the difference matters. I
don't think there's a way around the problem except for occasionally
having the conversation that just happened.
It's also fairly usual to call [] "square brackets", presumably
because in common usage "brackets" usually means ().
(I just went and looked in my little Oxford dictionary from the 1970s -
they specifically included all four types in their definition of the
word "bracket".)
Maybe the English language will change, now that computers are common
enough for the different types of brackets to matter to more people
than they once did.
--
David
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