On 19 April 2016 at 08:34, Erik Bray <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 :)
Yes, I have noticed that too among physicists, chemists, engineers: they talk about their "codes" where we would say "software" or just "code". Here https://pop-coe.eu/ they hedge their bets by writing "code(s)"! John > > 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. -- 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.
