> All I can say is that I have never been so insulted (even by the likes of my moronic sister (who seems to delight in making me uncomfortable (and she is so good at it, knowing just how to push my buttons (which I think is a skill that all siblings possess to some extent (which I believe proves some sort of genetic link (despite the fact that I really enjoyed genetics in school (relating on so many levels to Gregor Mendel and his peas (but of course peas make me gag, since my throat swells when I eat them)))))))) as I was by someone suggesting that I have ADD.
I tend to write with an excessive amount of parenthesis with context/tangents. I used to joke it was due to Lisp/Scheme being one of my first languages. Took me a few years to realize the ADD connection.
Those parentheticals can be rewritten with commas, which sent me on an exploratory tangent trying to see if one could use commas instead of parens in Lisp.
Like a sibling commenter said, commas are not enough to be unambiguous. Ambiguity is fine in prose, because we can resolve it from context, but computers need something clear and well structured.
Me too - I try to avoid parentheticals in polished writing because they're usually there to avoid having to decide if something is really important. If it's not important, take it out (or if it's a very technical detail that can be skipped on first reading, maybe put it in a footnote (uhoh, I'm doing it)).
Is use of deeply nested parentheticals really a sign of ADD? Certainly, nesting the parentheticals deep enough to overflow your mental context stack will lead to losing the plot. However, if both you and your intended listener have the capacity to keep all of the contexts in memory, it wouldn't seem to cause problems.
Brilliant.