On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 02:39:11PM -0500, bob gailer wrote:
> On 1/24/2014 10:28 PM, bob gailer wrote:
>
> Sorry for misspelling parens.
>
> My reason for requesting the various names is that it makes
> communication clear, explicit and terse.
>
> When someone says just "brackets" what does he actually mean?
It's possible to write ambiguous or unclear sentences about anything,
not just brackets. Singling out them out for special treatment makes
little sense to me. The nature of the English language is that we can
write unclear sentences:
"And then she told her that she knew that he said that she knew
about that time he and she kissed at a party..."
How many people are involved? This is an extreme case, exaggerated for
effect, but people do speak like that and given a little bit of context
people are usually pretty good at disambiguation. Compared to that,
inferring the required type of bracket is usually trivial.
If I'm talking to other Australians, I'll generally use "bracket" on its
own to mean round () brackets, as that's the normal use here. In an
international context, it will be either obvious from context, or
generic and apply equally to any sort of bracket.
E.g. if I'm talking about a line of code that says
print(mylist.index(None)
and say "you're missing the closing bracket", is it really so confusing
to infer that it's a closing ROUND bracket ) rather than a square
bracket ] that is needed? Even a beginner should be able to work that
out.
But I'm only human, and it is possible that at some point I'll make a
mistake and write a confusing sentence where the meaning cannot be
inferred, whether that's about brackets or something else doesn't
matter. If you, or anyone else, catches me making a *specific* ambiguous
statement that is unclear, regardless of whether it is due to the word
"bracket" or not, then I welcome people asking me to clarify.
This is an international forum, and English an international language
with many slight differences between variations and dialects. Even in
American English alone, there are ambiguous terms. "Coke" could mean a
beverage by the Coca-Cola company, a generic or rival cola beverage, a
generic carbonated beverage of arbitrary flavour, an illegal drug, or a
type of coal.
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/308-the-pop-vs-soda-map/
Somehow Americans cope with that. They can learn to cope with the many
flavours of brackets as well :-)
> For more grins see
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/06/ascii-pronunciation-rules-for-programmers.html
> and http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/
Nice :-)
--
Steven
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