Is there any kind of sensible difference between the tags braces and brackets? If not, probably brackets should be made a synonym for braces; if so, the wikis need to explain it better, especially due to the ambiguity/regional variation in the meaning of "brackets": it can refer not only to {}
and []
, but also to ()
, or even <>
(!) (but hopefully not here, as we have the proper \langle
and \rangle
at our disposal). (For U.K. readers: mentally rearrange the appearances of the delimiter pairs above to suit.)
I think braces was originally created for things like \underbrace
or big braces next to text. As such I think we can make it as synonym of brackets, but I would keep the tag about typesetting braces/brackets/parentheses/...
For the TeX source code symbol (that you are describing in your proposed tag wiki edit), maybe we should introduce grouping? That would cover the catcode 1 and 2 symbols, as well as \bgroup
etc.
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No, "grouping" wouldn't cover it; the symbols are also used for delimiting arguments and macro bodies (and likely for other things) which do not involve grouping. – SamB Feb 16 '11 at 0:17
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I do agree that it is desirable to have distinct tags for the two things, though; I just don't think "grouping" is a good name for the tag about the syntactical braces, and I can't really think of a good new name for either half of the existing tag, except maybe "brace-symbols" for the kind that appear on paper... – SamB Feb 16 '11 at 0:26