On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 3:11 AM, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Kwankyu Lee <[email protected]> wrote: >> Which one is correct? >> >> (1) "This is based on code by A and B" >> (2) "This is based on codes by A and B" >> (3) "This is based on the codes by A and B" >> >> I am just curious. I am not a native English speaker. > > In American, (1) is correct. > > I just did Google searches for the exact string "This is based on the > codes by" and "This is based on codes by" and it says "No results > found" in both cases, so (2) and (3) are definitely wrong in English.
I'm surprised no results came up. Something I noticed quickly when I first started working with astronomers and astrophysicists was that it's not uncommon for researchers in those fields to refer to their software as "codes". I usually don't say anything directly to them because I don't want to be a pedantic jerk. But it always just struck me as odd, and I've complained about it a few times in other contexts. It doesn't help that many researchers don't have strong programming backgrounds and see even open source software as something of a black box--and to me calling it "codes" only makes it worse. As if it's a pile of cryptic runes to be decoded. But it's just a linguistic oddity I guess :) Erik -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
