Comment by thaumasiotes
4 years ago
> One of the few times I get to remember that English is only my second language.
Most native speakers aren't aware of the terms. They'll call anything by any name.
There is a significant constituency for "curly brackets {}" and "square brackets []".
Anyway, there are mistakes you could make that would give you away as a nonnative speaker, but that wasn't one of them.
> There is a significant constituency for "curly brackets {}" and "square brackets []".
Yes, but there is still basically no constituency for “parentheses” (“{}”) or “parentheses” (“[]”), except in some narrow specific contexts; in programming, one example would be discussion of certain Lisp dialects where either all or certain uses of “()” in classic Lisp can (or, in the “certain” case, sometimes must) use the others, in which context “parentheses” are sometimes used generically for all three.
So, while there is a variety of ways paired delimiters are described by native speakers, the particular use here was still outside of the normal range of that variation.