[access-uk] Re: A Braille question about round and square brackets
- From: "George Bell" <george@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:22:34 +0100
My apologies, Jackie. It is indeed dot 3 to close.
Unfortunately "British Braille", which is my own braille
Bible, doesn't use the Simbraille font when displaying
braille, and so at a quick glance visually, 3 and 6 can look
the same.
To expand a little on the question of brackets, there are in
fact three main types. The round ones, square ones an curly
ones.
Round brackets are the most popular and generally used to
add information. For example, "By using lower g (dots
2,3,5,6), we are indicating a bracket of some kind."
Square brackets in editorial type content, are often used to
fill in unspoken words. For example, "My own [wife] says
I'm nuts". However, in computer parlance, they are often
used to embrace text which may for some reason require to be
treated (or not treated) specially. If you look at every
Subject line on this list, you will see "[access-uk]". By
having this in square brackets, the system is able to sort
subject lines, and ignore the list name. So in theory, I
could have messages from 8 different lists, sorted by
subject, regardless of what was in square brackets in the
Subject line.
There's quite a good explanation of both the above at
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/bracket.htm
which is worth looking at from a journalistic point of view.
Finally Curley brackets. These were originally used where
you wanted to put brackets round two or more lines such is
in mathematical expressions, but these days they tend to be
used for all manner of purposes, though mostly in computer
programming as a form of delimiter character.
George.
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