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.

In reply to Re^4: 1. Go compare! Guardian's algortithm riddle and mathematical proof by pryrt
in thread 1. Go compare! Guardian's algortithm riddle and mathematical proof by LanX

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