Re: st: including parentheses in stata helpfile

[Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com>]

Just as myself, Sergiy is being heavily influenced by Russian
mathematical language, where we have just one word "skobka" (plural
"skobki") for every type of parentheses/brackets/whatever you call
them. To disambiguate, Russians will also put an adjective like
"round", "square" or "curly" to specify how exactly this operator
looks like. Given how many Russian comments are scattered in
production code around the world, and some marginal penetration of
Russians into Stata Corp., as well, everybody must be aware of how
Russians spell thiiz werds.

I think "bra" and "ket" were coined by Paul Dirac in quantum
mechanics... or at least I remember seeing these in Richard Feynman's
wonderful physics books.


-- Stas Kolenikov, PhD, PStat (SSC)
-- Senior Survey Statistician, Abt SRBI
-- Opinions stated in this email are mine only, and do not reflect the
position of my employer
-- http://stas.kolenikov.name



On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 8:59 AM, Sergiy Radyakin <serjradyakin@gmail.com> wrote:
> And the classy page here is also quite entertaining:
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/06/ascii-pronunciation-rules-for-programmers.html
> Does anybody know what's the story behind the "wax/wane" naming?
>
> Nick, in quite a few languages ({[< are denoted with two words, where
> one is responsible for the concept of 'join' and the other for
> 'shape'. Hence whatever English word you first learn for 'join'
> usually sticks for life. Thus I am more likely to say "round brackets"
> and "square brackets", rather than "parentheses" and "brackets" (and
> to some extent because of the excruciating pain of spelling
> parentheses/parenthesis).
>
> Best, Sergiy
>
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 3:50 AM, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have never heard { } being called parentheses before
>>
>> For a comprehensive, and also informative and entertaining, list see
>>
>> http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html
>>
>> Nick
>> njcoxstata@gmail.com
>>
>> On 11 June 2013 05:59, Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> help smcl##ascii gives:
>>>
>>> {c -(}    { (left curly brace)
>>> {c )-}    } (right curly brace)
>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Matthias Schonlau
>>
>>>> How Do I put a parenthesis in a (user-written) stata help file example?  My helpfile includes this line:
>>>>         forval i=1/5 open bracket
>>>> but should read
>>>>         forval i=1/5 {
>>>> The problem is that
>>>>         {p 4 8 2}{inp:. forval i=1/5 open bracket }
>>>> Already contains a }.  Thanks for suggestions!
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