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

follows MOS?

I just noticed that xkcd mentioned this article and a rather amusing paragraph here . I don't like to be the bad guy here, but does anyone think that this should be fixed? I doubt that integrating examples directly into the content is allowed by the MoS... Maybe we could rewrite the sentence and keep the original one, except mark it as an example. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 14:52, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

A quick look through the MoS doesn't reveal any such explicit policy, although perhaps a related document has something. (OTOH, the MoS itself uses examples integrated into the content - not that it's meant to be an example of style itself.) I'd vote for keeping it, even if a strict reading of the guidelines turns up such a policy. Scott Lawrence (talk) 01:42, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, keep it. Just because this is an explanation to use brackets doesn't mean that they shouldn't be used. Look at the article about comma, there are a few hundred examples integrated into the text... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.50.58.118 (talk) 06:13, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Well yeah, of course using the english language in the article about the english language should be banned ?

No the real offense is that stuff in brackets should not contain the main message .

Square brackets with quills?

There is an additional pair of special brackets at code points U+2045 and U+2046. The description only identifies them as "square bracket[s] with quill" and their articles redirect to this one. Does anybody know what they are meant to be used for? -- 78.35.115.245 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 23:21, 14 March 2011 (UTC).