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Side note: Why do some people insist on calling it "a code" or "codes" (plural)? It's bizarre

• AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  I think it's British or European usage.
  • mokus 7y ago
    It’s also somewhat common in the scientific community even in the US.
    • enf 7y ago
      Whoever wrote the web interface to "p4 blame" at Danger called it "See who made these codes," which always sounded super weird to me
• zaat 7y ago
  Probably because a lot of people on the internet are not native English speakers, and so struggle to see the difference between "cat" and "code".
• bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
  Non-native English speakers whose native language doesn't distinguish countable and uncountable nouns is a possibility, but it's still very strange to say "two codes" in those languages, it doesn't have a clear meaning. Until you see that "code" in ordinary-day language is an ugly word, it's ill-defined, and is used to refer to so many things, but usually with implications of secrecy or espionage. For example, it can refer to the combination of a lock, e.g. a password. It can refer to an encoding scheme or an encoder, e.g. Morse code, Pulse-Code Modulation. It can refer to a codename, e.g. Project X. And most commonly, it refers to an encryption algorithm (or its output), e.g. AES (or ciphertext), or a sentence of something written in a programming language, e.g. "one-liner". And most people who don't have an engineering background usually don't realize those are not the same thing, they think a telegram in Morse code, a ASCII-encoded string, the combination of their lock, an encryption algorithm, or a line of code in programming language are the same thing, they just picture it as a number (well, they are numbers, all information is numbers, but their visual representations and purposes are very different) - when you have this mentality, "a code" or "two codes" makes sense.