DOC: Clarifying Terminology: "Brackets" vs "Parentheses"

[vertigoa]

Pandas version checks

• I have checked that the issue still exists on the latest versions of the docs on main here

Location of the documentation

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/dev/getting_started/intro_tutorials/02_read_write.html

Documentation problem

Note

When asking for the dtypes, no brackets are used! dtypes is an attribute of a DataFrame and Series. Attributes of a DataFrame or Series do not need brackets. Attributes represent a characteristic of a DataFrame/Series, whereas methods (which require brackets) do something with the DataFrame/Series as introduced in the first tutorial.

Suggested fix for documentation

I am just learning pandas, so please excuse me if I am incorrect. I wonder if this may be a regional things or matter of convention I am not yet awaare of. The use of the word "brackets" in the pandas documentation to describe parentheses () can be confusing. "brackets" refer to square brackets [ ], which are used for indexing and selecting data. , while "parentheses" refer to () used when calling methods. It seems that in this particular documentation, the term "brackets" is being used to refer to parentheses.

[rhshadrach]

I indeed don't call () brackets, but is used that way in British-English. I think improving the language here with something like round brackets or parentheses or even just replacing it with the symbol like no ``()`` are used would be welcome.

[rhshadrach]

@vertigoa - can you give this issue an informative title? Currently it is Doc:.

[vertigoa]

can you give this issue an informative title? Currently it is Doc:.

Thank you for pointing that out, @rhshadrach. I have edited the title; I hope it makes more sense now. Also, I think your points about the terminology are great ideas. The actual "Getting Started" section in the documentation is fantastic from any beginner's perspective. I was very engaged with it. It was just that one section that confused me quite a bit. Otherwise, I think the format and wording of what I have read so far is extremely helpful. Cheers!

[Deekshita-S]

take

[Deekshita-S]

I'm encountering an issue while building the documentation for pandas. The error message is as follows:

'Exception occurred:
File "C:\virtualenvs\pandas-dev\Lib\site-packages\IPython\sphinxext\ipython_directive.py", line 584, in process_input
raise RuntimeError(
RuntimeError: Unexpected exception in C:\Users\deeks\pandas-Deekshita\doc\source\user_guide/enhancingperf.rst line 101
The full traceback has been saved in C:\Users\deeks\AppData\Local\Temp\sphinx-err-8zh0n6cs.log, if you want to report the issue to the developers.
Please also report this if it was a user error, so that a better error message can be provided next time.
A bug report can be filed in the tracker at https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues. Thanks!'

This is the line(line 101) referred to in enhancingperf.rst:
%load_ext Cython

I've made no modifications to the file.

Environment:
Python 3.11.6
sphinx-build 7.2.6
ipython 8.20.0

[nkasing]

I wasn't able to reproduce that error, although the environment.yml file specifies Python v3.10

Could you try the doc build once more with the provided env/dependencies and see if you still have problems?