What is the difference between (this), {this}, and [this]?

Question

I'm talking about the brackets.

Answer 1

Brackets are punctuation marks used in pairs to set apart or interject text within other text. With respect to computer science, the term refers to only the square or box type. [1]

Types of brackets include parentheses or round brackets ( ), box brackets or square brackets [ ], curly brackets or braces { }, and angle brackets 〈 〉. All these forms may be used according to typographical conventions that may vary from publication to publication and may vary even more from language to language. Some typical uses in English texts follow.
Usage

In addition to referring to the class of all types of brackets, the unqualified word bracket is most commonly used to refer to a specific type of bracket. In modern American usage, this is usually the square bracket, whereas in modern British usage it is usually the parenthesis.

In fact, in American usage, parentheses are usually considered separately from other brackets, and calling them brackets at all is unusual, even though they serve a similar function.

[edit] Types of brackets

[edit] Parentheses ( )

Parentheses (the singular is parenthesis, with an i) – sometimes called round brackets, curved brackets, oval brackets, or just brackets; or, colloquially, parens, or fingernails – are used to contain parenthetical (or optional, additional) material in a sentence that could be removed without destroying the meaning of the main text.

John Lennard, in "The exploitation of parentheses in English printed verse," usefully coined the term lunula to refer specifically to the opening curved bracket, the closing curved bracket and the textual contents between.

In formal writing, parentheses may be used to add supplementary information, such as "Sen.Jon Kennedy (D., Massachusetts) spoke at length."

In literature and informal writing, parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in stream of consciousness literature. Of particular note is the great southern American author William Faulkner, whose use of parenthetical constructions was legendary, effective, and (at times) frustrating. See Absalom, Absalom! and the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury for the best known examples. In most writing, overuse of parentheses is usually a sign of a badly structured text.

Historically, parentheses have been used where the solidus is modernly used—that is, in order to depict alternatives, such as "parenthesis)(parentheses". Examples of this usage can be seen in editions of Fowler’s.

Parentheses may also be nested (with one set inside another set (this is not commonly used in formal writing)). Sometimes square brackets will be used for the inner set of parentheses (in other words, a secondary phrase in parentheses [for example, this one]).

Any punctuation inside parentheses or other brackets is independent from the rest of the text: "Mrs. Pennyfarthing (What? Yes, that was her name!) was my landlady". In this usage, the explanatory text in the parentheses is a parenthesis.

In mathematics, parentheses are used to signify a different precedence of operators. For example, 2 + 3 × 4 would be 14, since the multiplication is done before the addition. On the other hand, (2 + 3) × 4 is 20, because the parentheses override normal precedence, causing the addition to be done first. They are also used to set apart the arguments to mathematical functions. For example, f(x) is the function f applied to the variable x. In the coordinate system, parentheses are used to denote a set of coordinates. For example, (4,7) may represent the point located at 4 on the x-axis and 7 on the y-axis. Parentheses can also represent multiplication, as in the instance of 2 (3) = 6. Please note that in mathematic equations, if parentheses are used twice around each other, the inner pair are parentheses and the outer pair are square brackets. Ex: [5-(7+3)]+4=x

[edit] Box brackets or square brackets [ ]

Square brackets are used to enclose explanatory or missing […] material, especially in quoted text. For example, "I appreciate it [the honor], but I must refuse". Or, "the future of psionics [See definition] is in doubt".

The bracketed expression sic (Latin for "thus") is used to indicate errors that are "thus in the original"; a bracketed ellipsis […] is often used to indicate deleted material; bracketed comments are used to indicate when original text has been modified for clarity: "I'd like to thank [several unimportant people] and my parentals [sic] for their love, tolerance […] and assistance [italics added]".

Square brackets are also sometimes used as parentheses within parentheses (secondary parentheses [as mentioned earlier]).

With the International Phonetic Alphabet, square brackets are used to indicate a phonetic transcription (as opposed to a phonemic one).

In chemistry, square brackets can also be used to represent the concentration of a chemical substance, or to denote a complex ion.

In architecture, square brackets can be used to emphasize cool words, such as [metaliving] or [cityscape]. It can also be used to make the layout generally look more cool and modern.

In proofreading, square brackets (called move-left symbols or move right symbols) are added to the sides of text to indicate changes in indentation
Curly brackets or braces { }

Curly brackets (so-called in British English; North American English prefers braces) are sometimes used in prose to indicate a series of equal choices: "Select your animal {goat, sheep, cow, horse} and follow me". They are used in specialized ways in poetry and music (to mark repeats or joined lines). In mathematics they are used to delimit sets.

Presumably due to the similarity of the words brace and bracket (although they do not share an etymology), many people casually treat brace as a synonym for bracket. Therefore, when it is necessary to avoid any possibility of confusion, such as in computer programming, it may be best to use the term curly bracket rather than brace. However, general usage in North American English favours the latter form. The term curly braces is redundant since no other type of brace exists. Indian programmers often use the name "flower bracket".

Curly brackets or braces { }

Curly brackets (so-called in British English; North American English prefers braces) are sometimes used in prose to indicate a series of equal choices: "Select your animal {goat, sheep, cow, horse} and follow me". They are used in specialized ways in poetry and music (to mark repeats or joined lines). In mathematics they are used to delimit sets.

Presumably due to the similarity of the words brace and bracket (although they do not share an etymology), many people casually treat brace as a synonym for bracket. Therefore, when it is necessary to avoid any possibility of confusion, such as in computer programming, it may be best to use the term curly bracket rather than brace. However, general usage in North American English favours the latter form. The term curly braces is redundant since no other type of brace exists. Indian programmers often use the name "flower bracket".

Curly brackets are often used in internet communities and through instant messaging to indicate hugging. {{{{{{{username}}}}}}}\
Angle brackets (〈 〉) are often used to enclose highlighted material. Some dictionaries use angle brackets to enclose short excerpts illustrating the usage of words. True angle brackets are not available on a typical computer keyboard, so the "less than" and "greater than" symbols are used instead (<, >). These are often loosely referred to as angle brackets when used in this way. For example, the symbols < and > are often used to set apart URLs in text, such as "I found it on Example.com ". It may also often be found to indicate an e-mail address, such as "This photo is copyrighted by John Smith ", and is the computer-readable form for such in message headers as specified by RFC 2822.


* Opening and closing parentheses correspond to ASCII and Unicode characters 40 and 41, or 0x0028 and 0x0029, respectively.
* For square brackets corresponding values are 91 and 93, or 0x005B and 0x005D.
* For braces, 123 and 125, or 0x007B and 0x007D.
* True angle brackets are available in Unicode at code points 0x27e8 and 0x27e9 (for mathematical use), or 0x9001 and 0x9002 (for East Asian languages), or 0x2329 and 0x232A (for "technical" use, canonically equivalent to the CJL code points 0x900x). The less than and greater than symbols can be found in both Unicode and ASCII at code points 60 and 62, or 0x003C and 0x003E.

Also, in many computer languages:

* "(" and ")"
o are often used to define the syntactic structure of expressions, overriding operator precedence: a*(b+c) has subexpressions a and b+c, whereas a*b+c has subexpressions a*b and c.
o are used to contain the arguments to functions: substring($val,10,1). On the other hand, in Lisp they open and close s-expressions and therefore function applications: (cons a b). In Fortran-family languages, they are also used for array references.
* "[" and "]"
o are used to refer to array or associative array elements, and sometimes to define the number of elements in an array: queue[3].
o in most regular expression syntaxes square brackets are used to denote a character class: a series of possible characters to choose from.
* "{" and "}" are used in some languages to define the beginning and ending of blocks of code. Languages which use this convention are said to belong to the curly brace family of programming languages. In some of these languages, they also denote array constants. On the other hand, in the Pascal programming language, "{" and "}" define the beginning and ending of comments.
* "<" and ">" are used in SGML (and its applications and variants such as HTML and XML), to enclose code tags:

Answer 2

(Parenthases) mean that they contain additional information that would not change the meaning of the text. Or in math, they mean first in order of operation.
Curly brackets are used for a set of equal choices. In math they indicate a set.
Square brackets indicate that there is missing material or to bracket a 'sic' indicating a mistake is deliberately being quoted.
Square brackets are also used inside of a parentheses bracket.
Beware those who cut and paste from WIKIPEDIA. (There is such a thing as 'too much information".

Answer 3

Nothing except the different brackets.

Answer 4

There is a TREMENDOUS difference.. The main thing that one can see immediately is the different brackets..

Answer 5

wow COOL dude person TOOO much information there for all of those rackets thingys. The difference is that they are different!! I Don't Know! W/E

Answer 6

(-) is a sub-text that is germain to the issue
{-} is used for math equations
[-] is to show an alteration to the original document, but done to clarify the paragraph

Answer 7

they are used for specific purposes in proper writing, refer to an english punctuation guide. then let me know what these are, ok?
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