Why the Hebrew layout has its brackets swapped?

[spremino]

Both round and curly/square brackets are swapped - that is: the closing bracket is on the left of the opening one - when compared to all other layouts that I know.  Does anybody know the reason for sure?

[demik]

jew know i never noticed that

[davkol]

Right-to-left writing system.

Sincerely,
Cpt. Obvious

[HeeCh2ei]

Both round and curly/square brackets are swapped - that is: the closing bracket is on the left of the opening one - when compared to all other layouts that I know.  Does anybody know the reason for sure?

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Just another instance of QWERTZ leetness.

[davkol]

…and for the really lazy, a direct quote from the relevant Wikipedia article:

One noteworthy feature is that in the standard layout, paired delimiters -– parentheses (), brackets [], braces {}, and angle brackets (less/greater than) <> –- have the opposite visual representation from the standard in left-to-right languages. Thus, an open parenthesis in a right-to-left language has the same visual representation as a close parenthesis in a left-to-right language. Key mappings follow the logical rather than the physical representation. For instance, whether on a right-to-left or left-to-right keyboard, Shift-9 always produces a logical "open parenthesis". On a right-to-left keyboard, this is written as the Unicode character U+0029, "right parenthesis": ). This is true on Arabic keyboards as well. On a left-to-right keyboard, this is written as the Unicode character U+0028, "left parenthesis": (.

[Malenky]

The answer to this is so oddly satisfying.