From owner-cvs-all Sun Jul 16 23:53:53 2000 Delivered-To: cvs-all@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (zoom0-087.telepath.com [216.14.0.87]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4D00137B829 for ; Sun, 16 Jul 2000 23:53:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 52181 invoked by uid 100); 17 Jul 2000 06:53:08 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14706.44372.11991.4679@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 01:53:08 -0500 (CDT) To: cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: brackets/braces/parens/brokets In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 14:20:18 +0930 > From: Greg Lehey > Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/share/man/man9 style.9 > > On Sunday, 16 July 2000 at 22:54:10 -0400, Christopher Masto wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 17, 2000 at 11:31:09AM +0930, Greg Lehey wrote: > >> For me, brackets are '(' and ')'. '[' and ']' are square brackets, > >> and '<' and '>' are angle brackets. '{' and '}' are braces. I'm sure > >> I'm not alone, and there are probably other naming conventions for > >> these symbols. It would make sense to spell out what the man page > >> means. > > > > A possibly unambigous set of terms?: > > > > '(' and ')': parenthesis > > '[' and ']': square brackets > > '<' and '>': angle brackets > > '{' and '}': curly braces > > > > When someone says "put brackets around that", I'm also unsure what > > they meant, because I've seen the word used for all four sets of > > characters. Same thing with "braces". There are probably some > > hideously officious ISO names for these. > > I don't really care which we end up with, as long as we define them > somewhere to avoid confusion. But it sounds good, modulo the typo > that Chris picked up. I think I'd leave out "curly", too: we don't > have any other type of brace. The problem with leaving out the "curly" is that the *reader* may think that "braces" means something other than "curly braces". If you're willing to do that, there are unique nouns for each pair: '()': parens (or parentheses) '[]': brackets '{}': braces '<>': brokets But that just reintroduces all the ambiguity problems again. To be absolutely clear, chose one noun and use different adjectives: '()': "round brackets" '[]': "square brackets" '{}': "curly brackets" '<>': "angle brackets" They could also be "braces" instead of "brackets", but that usage seems uncommon for everything but curly braces.