Talk:Bracket
Dear LC, This article is mainly about punctuation in English text.
Outside the programming context, "curly braces", or even "braces", is much more common than "curly brackets", but I do think the distinction is useful in programming contexts. I have attempted to deal with the diffrerences in usage in the associated article. I was concerned that readers accustomed to calling them "braces" would be confused by "brackets".
"Brackets" is basically a little-used synonym for "braces", and is given as such deep in the definitions in both the Webster's Unabridged and the Webster's Collegiate. The Random House Unabridged gives "brace" as a synonym for "bracket" only in the architectural sense. The OED does not give "bracket" as a synonym for "brace", nor do three college English handbooks I have lying around. My ancient Roget's Thesaurus includes both in a category called Vinculum, but since "hyphen" and "ox-yoke" are also in there, that isn't really data. The more modern Random House Word Menu carefully distinguishes "brackets" from "braces". Of course, none of these sources is particularly sophisticated about computer usage.
It is certainly true that the "class of brackets" includes braces, as both this article and the punctuation article clearly state, but the class also includes parentheses, and even though I turned up a reference in the Oxford English Dictionary to "curved brackets", again, hardly anyone actually calls parentheses "curved brackets".
See the Talk page under Punctuation for the sharply contrasted etymologies of "braces" and "bracket".Ortolan88
Ortolan88, I saw your etymology, and thought it was great. :-) My intent wasn't to emphasize one term over another. I just wanted to fix two mistakes.
One mistake was that the Punctuation page claimed the symbols were given with their Unicode preferred names, where appropriate, but then it didn't give the Unicode preferred name. So I fixed the name to match the claim. It would have been just as good to fix the claim instead. I was just trying to fix the contradiction.
The other mistake is the use of the redundant phrase curly brace. The standard terms are curly bracket (to distinguish from other types of brackets) and brace (of which there is only one type, so no need to distinguish). According to the dictionary used by the Associated Press, there is a brace but not a curly brace. The same is true in the Random House Websters Dictionary. And the same in the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary. And the same in the American Heritage Dictionary. And the same in the Unicode standard index (the one that lists multiple names for each symbol). I see from Google that some people use the redundant term curly brace, but since it isn't in the standard references to which I have access, it appears to be slang rather than a standard term. I could have replaced the redundant curly brace with either curly bracket or brace, but I used both so I wouldn't offend anyone. Apparently unsuccessfully. :-) --LC