Talk:Bracket

Crystallography

Crystallography uses these things to denote whether a plane or direction is being discussed, and whether it's generic or specific. I have put up a basic account of their use in Crystallography#Notation, but you may want to wait a few days for it to stabilize before you copy it into this article. This may also convince someone to finally flesh out Miller index.--Joel 06:14 & :18, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Computer languages

The discussion on use of brackets in computer languages would be highly misleading to someone who didn't already know about the subject. It should be either (a) more complete, or (b) more obviously nothing more than a random survey of examples. Wording like "... are used to..." makes it sound like these are universal, and especially common, uses of brackets.

In the case of function arguments, this is true. But using parens to bound lists is pretty much restricted to the Lisp family, while many other languages use brackets for the same purpose (and braces for associative arrays). Square brackets are no more ubiquitous in regexps than parens or braces (and similarly for shell patterns). Brackets may not be as common as braces for blocks (the Smalltalk family vs. the C family), but they're not negligible.

And the most common use of parentheses in computer languages is completely ignored--grouping subexpressions: "(2 + 3) * 4", "ASSERT((foo<bar, baz>(qux)))", "(1, 2), 3", the parens around test expressions in C control statements, etc.

Also, some languages use other symbols essentially as brackets, with the same character serving as "left" and "right" (see "| i |" in Smalltalk, similar to "|2|" in math).

And it's a little strange to not even mention how braces are used in CSS, and then use CSS braces as an example a few lines later.

Finally, it's strange that a handful of these uses appear in the general discussion above. For example, under "Types of brackets": "In computer programming, curly brackets sometimes denote the beginning and ending of a sequence of statements or define a scope."
Falcotron 07:02 & :03, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Usage in chat

On chatrooms and message boards, actions are put in brackets.

"I know she can't sing, but I like Lindsay Lohan {ducks from flying vegetables}."

There's also the "Insert Item" usage.

"I don't care if [insert nominee here] deserves to be in the hall of fame, I think that Maris should be in."

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.172.165 (talk) 05:33 & :34, 6 November 2006

Curly Brackets/Braces

The section Bracket#Curly bracket has the text "...when it is necessary to avoid any possibility of confusion, such as in computer programming, it may be best to use the term curly bracket rather than brace. However, general usage in North American English favours the latter form." This sounds a bit bias basically "You should say 'a' even though North American English says 'b'. Googling both yields about an even split ("Curly Brace" wins slightly over "Curly Bracket" but "Curly Brackets" wins slightly over "Curly Braces". Adding up the results make the two essentially even.) They seem to be both perfectly valid terms with different sects of English using different terms dominantly, which happens all the time. The text should be rewritten to sound better and more neutral in this regard. ~David Craft (talk) 17:46, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Agree – What do you propose as the re-worded text? — Senator2029 | talk 12:35, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

In forty years living in the UK, reading widely, and achieving an honours degree in English, I have never heard curly brackets referred to as 'squiggly.' Unless a citation can be provided, that text should be removed as misleading. Leegee23 (talk) 08:38, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. "Curly brackets" is in common usage in British education, but I've never heard "squiggly" used to describe the shape except possibly by a child as a joke. Dbfirs 20:22, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

U.S. bias?

How come U.S. usage is mentioned specifically in the lead but not any other country? 109.149.142.188 (talk) 16:46, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

No, not bias. We need to explain that Americans use the English language slightly differently from the rest of the English-speaking world. Dbfirs 20:26, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Parentheses are simply called 'brackets' in British English, for example. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.181.99.79 (talk) 14:38, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

They have simply been called "Parentheses" since they were invented by the ancient Greeks. They are so called in French and Spanish and most other languages, and as far as I can tell only called by the crude Saxon ananolgy "brackets" by the British relatively recently. Chrisrus (talk) 15:10, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it's all Greek to us on this side of the pond, but I think the actual Ancient Greek was παρένθεσις (parenthesis), and the plural was used more recently for the type of brackets normally used to indicate the extra bit "put in beside". Dbfirs 17:10, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I hadn't thought that Brits might not be aware of that: the singular is "parenthesis" and the plural is "parentheses", regardless of meaning or usage. So yes, keep that in mind because if someone does that wrong you might want to fix it. But so far as this thread goes, yes, it's written from a UK point of view, but even though UK is a minority dialect, it's not a problem for the article to be written this way as long as it informs as it does of the original and majority way. Chrisrus (talk) 22:17, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm so glad that you're happy with the article! Dbfirs 00:37, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

〖 and 〗 (lenticular brackets)

Hi,

〖 and 〗 used to redirect here, but were deleted (because there was no content). Is there an article somewhere else on those special characters? (Or could they be added to this one?) I am curious about them, but the search engine refuses to show any results.

They are also known as: (%E3%80%96 and %E3%80%97) (U+3010 and U+3011) (character 12304 and character 12305)

One use I found was that Microsoft word 2010 Equation Editor denotes 10¹⁰⁰⁰ as 〖10〗^1000 instead of 10^1000. This, however, is not notable in itself.

•ː• 3ICE •ː• 14:02, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Huh. That's interesting. Lenticular bracket. Never heard of them. And neither has Wikipedia, I guess, because that link showed red on preview. It should really link here, don't you? But there's nothing about them here. Do you have a WP:RS we could use to fix that? Chrisrus (talk) 00:33, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

I was wrong. As it turns out, Wikipedia does know about "lenticular brackets" they are mentioned in the article Japanese punctuation, although it doesn't seem to say what they're for. I Googled around a bit and came up with more about Japanese punctuation on the one hand, and lots of computer code instructions as to how to get them to appear in different programs. But nothing about why or how to use them in English. How did you come to know about them? What do you know about them apart from what you've already told us? Right now, it seems that the only ones who use them are the Japanese. Maybe we should redirect the red link above to Japanese punctuation. Chrisrus (talk) 00:50, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

What to do with a/an?

I tried to do some research just now but was unable to find a consensus on what to do with a/an in a case involving brackets, where the word inside the bracket starts with a vowel sound and the word outside with a consonant (or vice versa). For example, the sentence "She has taken up a/an (unusual) hobby". The sentence sounds better with an 'an', but only if the bit in brackets is there, which goes against the rules of bracket usage. Does anybody know/know how to find the answer? I have also added this point to the page on English articles. Dragongirlhellfire (talk) 13:46, 18 February 2012 (UTC)