Editing 2954: Bracket Symbols

{{comic
| number    = 2954
| date      = July 3, 2024
| title     = Bracket Symbols
| image     = bracket_symbols_2x.png
| imagesize = 592x569px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = ’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"
}}

==Explanation==
Brackets, also called parentheses, are typographical symbols used to delimit a section of text. Unlike most typographical symbols, brackets usually come in pairs, and the end bracket is typically the mirror image of the start bracket.

This comic shows a variety of (mostly) real bracket symbols, along with Randall's description.

{| class="wikitable sortable" 
|+Descriptions
|-
! Symbols
! Comic text
! Real use
! Explanation of the joke
|-
!( )
|Regular parentheses for setting stuff aside
|Ordinary curved brackets, or parentheses, are the most commonly used in literature. They typically denote remarks that are relevant to, but not part of, a sentence (for example, a clarifying explanation). In stage plays, teleplays and screenplays, they can indicate stage directions. They are also frequently used in mathematical expressions and programming languages to force a particular order of evaluation.
|Randall explains, accurately, that these are regular parentheses. No joke yet.
|-
![ ]
|Square brackets (more secure)
|In literature, square brackets often denote meta-textual information, such as {{w|Gloss (annotation)|glosses}}, omissions for brevity, editorial comments or translation-related notes. In mathematics, they are often used for {{w|Matrix (mathematics)|matrices}} or {{w|Interval (mathematics)|closed intervals}}. Sometimes they are used as outer parentheses for easier visual matching in complicated expressions. In programming languages, square brackets are commonly used as the indexing operator, with the index being placed inside the brackets. They may also be used to denote specific data structures such as arrays or lists. In language definition syntaxes such as {{w|Extended Backus–Naur form}}, square brackets indicate something optional. 
|The straight edges and sharper corners make these brackets resemble a solid box, presumably made of a hard material, which would be a more secure container than the "soft"-looking curved brackets. They also resemble staples, which are used to hold things in place securely. This may also be a pun on "open" and "closed" intervals, with the joke being that a "closed" interval is more secure than an "open" one, since it is harder for things to leave a closed container without your consent.
|-
!{ }
|This stuff is expensive so be careful with it
|Known as "curly brackets" or "braces". Rarely used in normal text, although may be used in expanded form to 'enclose' multiple optional lines following/preceding a single element of common purpose (similar to the 'split and recombined tracks' of [[2243: Star Wars Spoiler Generator]]). In mathematics, usually used to denote {{w|Set (mathematics)|sets}}, but other usage is possible. In programming languages they are popularly used to denote the start and end of a block of code, to the point that there is an entire group of languages informally known as '{{w|List of programming languages by type#Curly-bracket languages|curly-bracket languages}}'. In language definition syntaxes, curly brackets often denote that an expression can be repeated multiple times.
|Curly brackets look fancy, like gates with ornate ironwork. Randall implies a world where expensive stuff is set aside using the fanciest brackets available. Writing them by hand is also more complicated than regular or square brackets (in a way making them slightly more time consuming/expensive).
|-
!<span style="display:inline-block; transform:scaleX(-1);">‶</span> ‶
|Someone is talking
|Used to denote speech or citations in normal text. There are various styles from the identical pairing "&#8201;" to the 66-and-99-like “&#8201;” which differentiates opening and closing quotes. The comic appears to use a handwriting-only slope-variation.
The straight (ASCII) style is commonly used in programming languages to denote text that is data, rather than code, such as literal messages intended to be displayed to the user.

Word processors commonly implement “smart quotes” by detecting the use of the single-type keyboard character at each end of a possible quote and converting it into the fancier left/right versions (though this is not always desired, leading to the default behaviour being disabled or reverted).
|Typical form of quotation marks. Quotation marks are most often used in literature to mark dialogue (words said by characters talking) as opposed to descriptions or narrative. Some languages or communities use different typographical conventions such as „German quotation marks“. See also below for British and French conventions.
|-
!<span style="display:inline-block; transform:scaleX(-1);">‵</span> ‵
|Someone British is talking
|[https://www.grammarly.com/blog/single-vs-double-quotes/ Allegedly 'British quotation marks'], although this may be disputed by actual Brits who were taught otherwise. Single quotes might be more often used as '{{w|scare quotes}}' or a related form of '<em>emphasis</em>' marker. One possible distinction is that single-quotes give non-literal paraphrasing, wherever double-quotes are used for the verbatim reporting of words (spoken or written).

In programming languages single quotes are used for diverse purposes. In C and Pascal families they are used to delimit single characters as opposed to strings of characters, which use double quotes. In many scripting languages like Unix shells, Perl, Python, JavaScript and others single quotes are used for strings as an alternative for double quotes, in some cases with different rules for interpreting the contents of such string. In Visual Basic single quotes (unpaired) are used to mark comments. There are other uses, depending on the language.

As with the double quotes above, the comic versions appear to be handwriting-specific, with no easy-to-use equivalents in commonly used computer fonts.
|Alternative form of quotation marks. Some British media use these to mark dialogue, for historic reasons, though in modern usage the double quotes may be more common [https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/quotes/marks and acceptable]. 

Single quotes within double quotes (and/or double quotes within single, as necessary) can also be used to more clearly indicate reported words as part of an outer quote, i.e. when you're quoting one person and their statement contains a quote of someone else. The main quotation would be surrounded with double quotes, while the nested quotation is delimited with single quotes (or vice-versa, depending upon the house style in use). This may even be further alternated to arbitrary depth!
|-
!‹ ›
|An Animorph is talking
|{{w|Bracket#Angle_brackets|Angle brackets}}. Aside from telepathic speech in prose, it's often used in comics to indicate that a character is speaking a foreign language that has been translated for the reader's benefit – at least notionally. A form of angle brackets (in reality, using the more available {{w|less-than sign}} and {{w|greater-than sign}}, i.e. <> rather than ‹›) are heavily used in {{w|HTML}} to indicate markup tags that define how the source of websites intends to convey various stylistic and/or semantic distinctions.
|Books like the series {{w|Animorphs}} or science fiction novels use these when a character is communicating nonverbally, for example via telepathy. In the ''Animorphs'' series, this is called [https://animorphs.fandom.com/wiki/Thought-speak thought-speak], or sometimes "thought speech".
|-
!« »
|A French Animorph is talking
|French quotation marks. Used for quotes within quotes in some languages. For quoting conventions in different languages, see [https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/formex/physical-specifications/character-encoding/use-of-quotation-marks-in-the-different-languages this document].
|These symbols are called "guillemets" (ghee-ya-may) and are used in French texts as the first-level quotes. Here Randall is mixing the SF convention described above with actual French use.
|-
!<nowiki>|</nowiki> &#124;
|I'm scared of negative numbers but these sigils will protect me
|Vertical bars in mathematics are used for the {{w|Absolute value}} function.
|The absolute value of a number is its value with all negative and positive signs stripped off; in practical terms this is used to ensure a given value is positive (ex. <nowiki>|-10| = 10</nowiki>). If for whatever reason you need to "protect" your equations from negative numbers (which does come up in programming from time to time) the absolute value function has you covered &mdash; though it may not always be denoted with vertical bars. {{w|Sigil}}s are symbols used in magic, often for protection from evil.
|-
!*&#8201;* _&#8201;_ /&#8201;/
|I have a favorite monospaced font
|These symbols are conventionally used in text-based computer communications (such as emails, chats, Usenet News articles) to denote *bold*, _underlined_ or /italic/ font; some client programs interpret them and display actual bold text etc.
|The kind of person who uses these symbols is the kind of person who uses a {{w|terminal emulator}}, which allows users to select one's favorite (preferably monospace) font. A {{w|Monospace font}} is a font (set of shapes used for letters, numbers and symbols) in which every character has the same width, unlike a {{w|Typeface#Proportional_font|variable-width (proportional) font}}, in which, for example, the letter I is much narrower than W. While a proportional font is more pleasant to read,{{citation needed}} monospace is easier to represent in simple mechanical or electronic devices, and has been used almost exclusively in the advent of computer technology, specifically in text-only environments such as {{w|computer terminals}}; these most often had only one bare-bones font that did not provide separate glyphs for different styles of character (weight, slant) or the ability to superimpose characters (directly adding underlines).
|-
!~~
|I'm being sarcastic and I had a Tumblr account in 2014
|Used in the [https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax/#strikethrough markdown specification] to denote text with a horizontal line through it, known as "strikethrough". Used by most places that implement the markdown spec, such as Discord, Reddit, most wikis, Github and Tumblr.
|Strikethrough markup can be found on sites like Tumblr, Reddit or Discord to indicate that you didn't really mean something you said, and such usage peaked in the mid-2010s. This could also reference the trend of putting tildes after words or sentences to indicate the words are being said in a lilting or sing-song manner, or to indicate it is being said in a cute, nice, seductive timbre or as a particular part of a subcultural reference, e.g. in {{w|Furry fandom}}. Applied to a chosen username, it may be made to make it stand out, or else add sufficiently uniqueness despite the core name being likely to be in common use.
|-
![([{()}],)]
|These Python functions are not getting along
|The square brackets denote a mutable [https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/introduction.html#lists list], the round brackets an immutable [https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#tuples-and-sequences tuple] , and the curly brackets a [https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#sets set]. It is valid to have them nested like this. [] could also be a slice (a bit of a list or tuple) and {} could be a [https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#dictionaries dictionary], but the syntax is wrong for these. 
|Passing the output from one function to the input of another will sometimes require putting it in a container or changing what type of container it is in. This is an extreme and unrealistic example where the next function might need the data put into a very complex structure. This may be an example of spaghetti code - code that is badly maintained or written in programming languages including Python will often be badly organized creating a mess of indentations and brackets.
|-
!⌊ ⌋
|Help, I'm a mathematician trying to work with actual numbers and they're scary
|Mathematical symbols meaning "floor" (i.e., round down to the nearest lower integer).
|Mathematicians stereotypically prefer to work with abstract symbols and concepts rather than numbers or indeed anything that might pertain to the real world. When presented with an "actual" ({{w|real number|real}}) number, it is possible that a mathematician may wish for it to be rounded to the nearest integer to make it simpler, or handle it using {{w|number theory}}.
|-
!∫ &nbsp;<span style="display:inline-block; transform:scaleX(-1);">∫</span>
|Why are you trying to read my violin?
|This is a joke item created by Randall; these symbols are not used as brackets.

∫ looks like the {{w|Integral symbol}} which itself is derived from a {{w|Long s}}. In mathematics it is usually paired with the differential of the variable of integration (e.g., dx). The symbol also looks like a lowercase {{w|Esh (letter)|esh}} (ʃ), used in phonetic transcription. There is no unicode symbol for a reversed integral (we have displayed it here as a reversed ∫) and it does not appear in Western mathematics typesetting &mdash; though it does appear in mathematical texts written in Arabic, along with other symbols likewise adapted to Arabic's right-to-left writing direction. The esh symbol has a reversed counterpart in Unicode, but it's quite a bit shorter (ʅ). 
|Violins are known for their characteristic {{w|F-hole}}s.<br> This symbol also resembles the top halves of a pair of curly braces (⎰ and ⎱).
|-
!<nowiki>| ⟩</nowiki>
|Don't stop here–this is quantum country
|This  {{w|Bra–ket notation|notation is used in quantum mechanics}} to notate a vector. This is called a ket, and the mirrored sign <nowiki>⟨|</nowiki> is called a bra. Combining them as bra-ket gives the inner product <nowiki>⟨|⟩</nowiki>.
| This is paraphrasing the movie ''{{w|Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (film)|Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas}}'', where {{w|Johnny Depp}}'s character Raoul Duke says "We can't stop here, this is bat country!" while hallucinating violently on drugs, though not as violently as later in the movie. The parentheses also resemble a directional road sign, perhaps indicating the way out of "quantum country".
|}
<!-- Title text -->

The title text includes different kinds of quotes, including the ASCII " and ' as well as the Unicode “ and ” (which have both an opening and closing version).
By default, iOS uses the latter curly quotes, while Windows uses the former straight quotes (an OS-level application of the “smart quotes” described above). Editing the same text on both an iPhone and a Windows computer, in circumstances with a different approach to such general auto-replacement, can leave both types of quotes in the text.

Parentheses are a running joke on XKCD. Previous parenthetical comics include:
* [[297: Lisp Cycles]] - referencing the Lisp programming language's use of parentheses
* [[312: With Apologies to Robert Frost]] - the punchline is a close parenthesis
* [[541: TED Talk]] - about ending parenthetical statements with emoticons
* [[859: (]] - which has an open parenthesis with none to close it
* [[1052: Every Major's Terrible]] - making fun of Computer Science as a major for its tedious use of matching parentheses

==Transcript==

[top text]
:Bracket Symbols
:and what they mean

[List of symbols and meanings split into two vertical colomns]

[Left Colomn Top]

:[Symbol] ( ) [Meaning] Regular parentheses for setting stuff aside

:[Symbol] [ ] [Meaning] Square brackets (more secure)

:[Symbol] { } [Meaning] This stuff is expensive so be careful with it

:[Symbol] " " [Meaning] Someone is talking

:[Symbol] ' ' [Meaning] Someone British is talking

:[Symbol] ‹ › [Meaning] An Animorph is talking

:[Symbol] « » [Meaning] A French Animorph is talking

[Left Colomn Bottom]

[Right Colomn Top]

:[Symbol] | | [Meaning] I'm scared of negative numbers but these sigils will protect me

:[Symbol] <nowiki>*</nowiki> * _ _ / / [Meaning] I have a favorite monospaced font

:[Symbol] ~ ~ [Meaning] I'm being sarcastic and I had a Tumblr account in 2014

:[Symbol] [ ( [ { ( ) } ] , ) ] [Meaning] These Python functions are '''''not''''' getting along

:[Symbol] ⌊ ⌋ [Meaning] Help, I'm a mathematician trying to work with actual numbers and they're scary

:[Symbol] ⎰⎱ [Meaning] Why are you trying to read my violin?

:[Symbol] | ⟩ [Meaning] Don't stop here--this is quantum country

[Right Colomn Bottom]


{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Math]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Animorphs]]