4.7 Delimiters
Delimiters are special pairs of characters defined to be outside the character set and alphabet of a text. In both COCOA and SGML, the following sets of delimiters are used:
- Single angle brackets < > enclose all tags and distinguish them from text.
- Single braces { } surround special single characters: joined letters, ligatures, or codes standing for characters not in ASCII.
- Single vertical bars | surround abbreviations.
- Double plus-signs surround + + superscript characters.
- Double underlines surround _ _ subscript characters.
In SGML tagging, the following additional delimiters appear:
- The bracket-pair & and ; surround entities.
- The delimiters <!-- --> enclose comments.
In COCOA encoding, the following additional delimiters appear:
- Double angle brackets << >> surround cancellations, letters deleted by a scribe.
- Triple angle brackets <<< >>> surround damaged text (from worm-holes, clipped pages, etc.).
- Double braces {{ }} surround interlineations inserted by a scribe above the line.
- Double parentheses (( )) surround interlineations inserted by a scribe below the line.
- Triple parentheses ((( ))) surround inline insertions by the scribe.
- Double vertical bars || ||surround hung words or parts of words added where they belong, or the first part of words that previously end the page and are newly copied before the final part of that word on the first line of the next page.
- Double square brackets (so-called ignore-brackets) [[ ]] surround comments not part of the text or the tagging.
- Double braces that enclose double diamond brackets {{<< ... >>}} indicate that this cancellation itself is cancelled.