Parentheses

Every now and then, I stumble on a Wikipedia passage that makes me smile. I don’t usually share them, since calling attention to them almost certainly means they’ll be rewritten or deleted, but in this case I can’t resist. The following is from the Bracket article:

Parentheses may also be nested (with one set (such as this) inside another set). This is not commonly used in formal writing [though sometimes other brackets (especially parentheses) will be used for one or more inner set of parentheses (in other words, secondary {or even tertiary} phrases can be found within the main sentence)].[citation needed]

To the three anonymous editors who together wrote this paragraph, thank you for brightening my day.

112 thoughts on “Parentheses

  1. Pingback: I made this for you! « these are the thoughts that fall out of my head

  2. Pingback: .NET/C#: Generating a WordPress posting categories page – part 2 « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff

  3. You know that trivia about “if you click the first link in the main text of any Wikipedia page, and repeat for long enough, you eventually get to Philosophy”?
    I tried it, and so far I either get to Philosophy within 20 moves, or get stuck in a loop. Weird, huh?

    It also seems that I get to Philosophy by one of only two different paths. I must investigate further…

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  5. Douglass Hofstadter does this in Gödel, Escher, Bach!
    Chapter V: “What is recursion? It is what was illustrated in [the last chapter]: nesting, and variations on nesting. The concept is very general. (Stories inside stories, movies inside movies, paintings inside paintings, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls (even parenthetical comments inside parenthetical comments!)–these are just a few of the charms of recursion.)”

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