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Congrats, you and pryrt found a graceful way out of the "special hell" sub thread ... ;-)
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That's the way I used to think of it, despite the fact that it doesn't hold up in a plethora of real life, real English situations. And since you specifically invoked "For those involved with computers", my first exception will be an example familiar to any Monk here:
In Perl, $a < $b would be said "scalar a is less than scalar b", despite the fact that, whether the scalar is an IV or NV or Math::BigRat, scalars a and b are always digital.
In mathematics, a < b is said "a is less than b", whether "a,b ∈ ℝ" (a and b are elements of the set of real numbers: analog) or "a,b ∈ ℤ" (a and b are elements of the set of integers: digital)
In science, light comes in discrete (digital) packets called photons, but "there is less light in the dark cave then outside in the bright sunshine".
"The count of the fingers I am holding up on my right hand (2) is less than the count of the fingers I am holding up on my left hand (4)", despite the fact that my fingers are quite obviously digital. (Sorry, I had to make that pun.) (I was going to originally use "quantity" rather than "count" in that example, but "quantity" isn't as restricted to digital as "count" is, so I switched to "count" to emphasize the digital nature of the values involved.)
As far as I can think of, "fewer" is only used for digital items (though I'd love to learn exceptions in that direction, too, to annoy the pedants), but "less" isn't as restricted to analog as some people claim.
There are many places where I think "less" sounds better to my ears than "fewer", but phrases like "10 items or less" doesn't bother me anymore, because there are too many exceptions for the rule ''"less" is always analog'' to carry the weight that I used to think it did. | [reply]
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"less" is analog,
"fewer" is digital.
The problem is that many people — I mean sophomoric pedants — believe many quantities are discrete when in fact they are continuous.
Take age, for example. A pedant might insist that "Bobby is less than ten years old" is incorrect, and must be phrased as "Bobby is fewer than ten years old".
But a person's age is not really an integer number of years, it is a float amount of time. :-) "Ten years old" is a watermark; if one has not yet reached that watermark in age, then they are less than that.
You see people making this ridiculous "correction" all the time.
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In conventional US/UK/Colony (I'm not qualified to assert any wider than this) usage age in years is integer down to about 5 years. Below that at some point age in years becomes fractional or is given in months down to about 8 months. Below that at some point ...
As a general thing I am irked by the misapplication of less/fewer, but in the case of age I'd generally treat years as integer.
Oh, and age is not float because there are ages that can't be represented by floats, or doubles for that matter, or any any way at all without invoking unbounded numbers.
Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond
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Well, it's still stupid, no matter how conventional. Time is continuous; therefore age is continuous.
age is not float because . . .
Obviously. Did you miss the smiley?
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Just found one in the wild:
the bodies that make up [the Oort Cloud] are small — fewer than 60 miles (97 kilometers) in diameter
It should be very obvious why this is wrong: the diameter of
an object is not a discrete (integer) number of miles/km —
stupid English conventions notwithstanding.
(And don't get me started on the conversion of 60 miles to 97 km.)
Today's latest and greatest software contains tomorrow's zero day exploits .
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