The various names of the bracket symbols

Split this thread off of this one because we aren't talking about wiki corrections.

Nyaha wrote:

http://felarya.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chronology

In the first paragraph, the brackets aren't closed.

Fixed; also allow me a curiosity inspired question: what country (or state) are you in that you call "(" and ")" brackets instead of parentheses?

Well, I live in Canada. O.o I've heard them called "brackets" for a long time because "parentheses" takes longer to say and is more difficult to spell. It's not that we never call them parentheses, it's just a short form-ish thing. I wasn't aware that calling them "brackets" wasn't a thing everywhere.

Ever heard of BEDMAS? Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction. It's for order of operations in math. Is that called "PEDMAS" where you are?

Nyaha wrote:

Well, I live in Canada. O.o I've heard them called "brackets" for a long time because "parentheses" takes longer to say and is more difficult to spell. It's not that we never call them parentheses, it's just a short form-ish thing. I wasn't aware that calling them "brackets" wasn't a thing everywhere.

Ever heard of BEDMAS? Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction. It's for order of operations in math. Is that called "PEDMAS" where you are?

Yes, here just south of Canada (Washington State) it is PEDMAS. We call "(" and ")" parentheses, "[" and "]" brackets or more often square brackets, and the programmers (at least the ones I know) here call "{" and "}" curly braces (this is technically the wrong thing to call them); not sure what the general public calls them.

I call them smiley mouths

I didn't know that other countries called them anything different. After all they're the same on all computers and type writers right?

jedi-explorer wrote:

I didn't know that other countries called them anything different. After all they're the same on all computers and type writers right?

All US-International standard keyboards (also known as 101 key QWERTY keyboards; if you live in America your computer probably has this layout) have the (, ), {, }, [, and ] symbols in the same spot. But other keyboard layouts, especially for languages that are not represented by Latin characters, have only some of them, or none of them. As for them being "the same"; from the computer's point of view a keypress is just a numerical input; there are various standard character encodings as to what numbers represent what symbols. If your program is using the ASCII or UNICODE standard then the various bracket symbols all have a well defined number that is their equivalent. Other character encodings may or may not have numbers for those symbols.


Also I split this thread off of this one because we aren't talking about wiki corrections.