operationrainfall.com/wp... Curly is a robot, and she's named after this character: "{". In north american english (and amongst programmers) this is called a curly brace, though it has other names

There. Thanks plurk :/

My degree is in Computer Science. In my domain, curly braces are most commonly seen in programming languages that descended from or were inspired by C (including java, c++, javascript, and hundreds of others)

the programming angle obviously works with curly as a robot, but it is also likely that her name comes from the programming concept.

Cave Story was written in C++ by Pixel, who also did all the writing, art, and music. He almost certainly named her (and her partner quote) with a mind to their use in programming.

In C (and C++), curly braces mark out statement blocks (groups of instructions). These languages are "lexically scoped", meaning that variables defined inside curly braces only exist there.

Once you hit a closing curly }, and variables declared inside are no longer available.

SO, lexicallyscoped, a massively nerdy deep programmer joke off of her name as a programmer joke for a robot played by a computer scientist.