unless they are error-correcting codes. These can me pluralised just fine...
On Tuesday, April 19, 2016 at 8:34:13 AM UTC+1, Erik Bray wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 3:11 AM, William Stein <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Kwankyu Lee <[email protected] > <javascript:>> 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.
