I vote yes. I already say upscalator and downscalator to distinguish between the two types of escalators. This is equally quirky and useful. I like it.
I sort of like orthogonalscalators, because it's huge and people seem happy to abuse "orthogonal". Plus, it brings strange things to mind when you mention that there are two or three of them in parallel...
Escalate already means move up, but has a clumsy opposite (de-escalate, I believe). Maybe descalator and escalator would be an alternative. However, ups- and downs- is better, plus you always get points for coining new words.
One problem "stache" already has, which "tache" exacerbates: they sound too much like "dash". While "open dash" and "close dash" don't really make sense, that doesn't prevent them from adding to the confusion.
LTACHE and RTACHE is a lot less to type, and has some consistency with LPAREN and RPAREN which I recall from "back in the day" when I was at university and learning about lexers and parsers (go dragon book!).
Hardly bad, literal yes, almost. 'Chaves' (keys, braces, staches in the post's joke) really come from the mathematical term 'chaveta', a punctuation, symbol that serves as a opening and closure in mathematical terms, hence the term as a key and not as brace (what would be better translated as braçadeira).
I grew up in India and am familiar with this, used to always wonder if I was wrong and why i often get confused when people say parentheses instead of brackets.(I have been in the US since the last 10 years)
In England I learned the version further up this thread. Computer Science nomenclature doesn't really follow British vs. American English separations as much as natural language.
In fact I don't recall anyone in Britain use those terms to me, either in university or at work.
Interesting, I'm from the US and I do call () parenthesis but the last two are the same from what I've learned and what other people say (usually in math classes).
That's how I learned it (although I never used 'round brackets' explicitly). This gets really confusing when you begin to talk to Americans and refer to 'brackets', thankfully everybody understands parens, and the others are the same.
Yes but in Physics the bra & ket vector notatin (kind of) mis-uses '<' & '>' to denote vectors as in <Ψ|H|Ψ> = E, for example (and if my memory servers right…)
I've never heard the "split parenthesis" - perhaps Quebec is different.
I have a Lisp teacher in Japan who has an interesting way of reading code. He says 'kakko' for '(', which is the usual Japanese word for a parenthesis. For the closing one, he says the word in reverse: 'kokka'. So "(def a (fn))" would be read "kakko def a kakko fn kokka kokka". It's quite effective.
Swedish uses left, right or more commonly amongst developers start and end prefixes. Måsvingar seem to be winning as the word of choice for braces amongst developers.
Strange names for characters can help when they significantly shorten, such as "bang" versus "exclamation" (though in context I'd prefer "not" when it has that meaning).
However, "stache" doesn't shorten "brace"; both of them have one syllable, and the latter even has fewer letters if you have to type it. So, this seems unhelpful except as a joke.
On the other hand, we could use a good joke name for {}, to go along with "octothorpe" (#), "twiddle" (~), and "ampersand" (&). :)
"brace", "bracket", "paren": {} [] ()
Or, if you really feel like disambiguating, "curly brace", "square bracket", "parenthesis": {} [] ()
Through folk etymology, it has been claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications, and that people began calling the new shape "Ampere's and". [3]
I'm not Danish, but on their behalf I'd like to note that these are called Tuborgs after the beer company. Apparently their delivery trucks had a profile that looked like the braces.
You're on to something: in my math classes they would often be referred too as a "væltet Turborg". Which means a "fallen down Tuborg" ie. it's turned on the side. The profile can be seen on the roof of this truck: http://www.mc-barskk.dk/images/Tuborg_Julebryg.jpg
No no no! For the love of $(DIETY), don't call them openstache and closestache, but rather leftstache and rightstache.
While there isn't a difference in left-to-right language, those of us unfortunate enough to have to support right-to-left languages need a nontrivial algorithm to decide whether openstache is actually a leftstache or a rightstache (because the grpahic form of the character is that of a leftstache, independent of directionality, rather than openstache, which mirrors based on directionality)
There is (AFAIK) one programming language that is RTL -- a variation on Basic which has been dead for about 15 years now.
The open-paren / left-paren problem is there even in e.g. Word, explictly _because_ it's considered open-paren rather than left-paren; When you type 'alif' (arabic 'a' equiv) 'ba' (arabic 'b' equiv) shift-9 (left paren), you get ')' 'ba' 'alif' . but if you type 'a' 'b' shift-9, you get 'ab('. if you insert a different directionality character immediately in fromt of the open-paren, the paren will be flip.
The rules for flipping parens are specified in the Unicode standard, and are extremely nontrivial and nonintuitive (both for implementing and for using -- it's often hard to get the kind of character you want!).
And it all exists because some idiot thinking "abstraction! It is an open-or-close that the person means, not the left-or-right!" was sitting in the committees making the decisions; There _was_ dissenting opinion, giving exactly the example I gave above, but abstraction was deemed way more important than usability.
73 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadup escalator. -> _/
down escalator: \_
(Edit: or maybe flatscalator)
Or is that the one going the other way?
Anyway, I don't get this, just as a joke. "Parenthesis", "Brackets" and "Braces" do just fine, thank you very much.
() Parenthesis => Parêntesis [] Brackets => Colchetes {} Braces => Chaves
In fact I don't recall anyone in Britain use those terms to me, either in university or at work.
I initially read that as "parentesi giraffe" which could have been plausible...
,-{ __ }-,
in French, they are (plural form):
Some computer scientists split the word in two to distinguish the opening one from the closing one (like Physicist do with the bra-ket notation).( a b c ) is then pronounced "Paren, a, b, c, thèse".
I have a Lisp teacher in Japan who has an interesting way of reading code. He says 'kakko' for '(', which is the usual Japanese word for a parenthesis. For the closing one, he says the word in reverse: 'kokka'. So "(def a (fn))" would be read "kakko def a kakko fn kokka kokka". It's quite effective.
() == parens [] == squares {} == staches (formerly curlies)
However, "stache" doesn't shorten "brace"; both of them have one syllable, and the latter even has fewer letters if you have to type it. So, this seems unhelpful except as a joke.
On the other hand, we could use a good joke name for {}, to go along with "octothorpe" (#), "twiddle" (~), and "ampersand" (&). :)
"brace", "bracket", "paren": {} [] ()
Or, if you really feel like disambiguating, "curly brace", "square bracket", "parenthesis": {} [] ()
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#Etymology
"INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?"
http://www.brewtruck.co.uk/country/tuborg.htm
clostache
Shorter this way.
http://carlos.bueno.org/brackets-of-the-world.pdf
While there isn't a difference in left-to-right language, those of us unfortunate enough to have to support right-to-left languages need a nontrivial algorithm to decide whether openstache is actually a leftstache or a rightstache (because the grpahic form of the character is that of a leftstache, independent of directionality, rather than openstache, which mirrors based on directionality)
} (y = x)fi ;("!dlrow olleH")nltirp.tuo.metsyS {
How about top to bottom languages? (Not doing that one out).
The open-paren / left-paren problem is there even in e.g. Word, explictly _because_ it's considered open-paren rather than left-paren; When you type 'alif' (arabic 'a' equiv) 'ba' (arabic 'b' equiv) shift-9 (left paren), you get ')' 'ba' 'alif' . but if you type 'a' 'b' shift-9, you get 'ab('. if you insert a different directionality character immediately in fromt of the open-paren, the paren will be flip.
The rules for flipping parens are specified in the Unicode standard, and are extremely nontrivial and nonintuitive (both for implementing and for using -- it's often hard to get the kind of character you want!).
And it all exists because some idiot thinking "abstraction! It is an open-or-close that the person means, not the left-or-right!" was sitting in the committees making the decisions; There _was_ dissenting opinion, giving exactly the example I gave above, but abstraction was deemed way more important than usability.