parentheses (plural of parenthesis (i.e. brackets (round ones)))

[Darren Dirt]

http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/08/parentheses/#comments

one of the comments mentions an opening paragraph that ... umm... exemplifies how "deep" they can go (and still make sense (kinda)).



http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/punctuation.html

There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity )))))))))))).

^ And reading it carefully, you realize that it actually makes sense.

[Mr. Analog]

You know someone is a programmer based on where they put their punctuation in relation to parenthesis.

Like this guy could be a programmer (but probably isn't.)

But this guy is a programmer (and it shows in his writing)!

[Tom]

I think that guy must have a lisp.

[Mr. Analog]

In the immortal words of Boris Badinov:
Hoo boy

[Lazybones]

Hold on while I load this in to my syntax highlighting text editor to track the brackets.

[Tom]

In the immortal words of Boris Badinov:
Hoo boy

You can say that again dahling

[Mr. Analog]

LOL!