> I scarcely believe that I was the first to use them, being so common in literature, but incorporation in computer sets is a different thing. This begs the qu

> I scarcely believe that I was the first to use them, being so common in literature, but incorporation in computer sets is a different thing. This begs the question: where did curly braces come from originally? Parentheses are common in prose writing, but I can’t think of why type writers or computers would have all had {} characters if there weren’t a history of their use. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to mention any literary history either (in fact it reference this article as their introduction to ASCII only). I suppose maybe set notation introduced them first? But I know that math notation we use today isn’t always the notation that the inventors used when first proposing ideas, so it’d be interesting to learn who first used curly braces for sets, and whether they invented that symbol or whether printing presses already could print them.