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TrainedMonkey

This message is sponsored by your friendly neighborhood big memory/storage consortium /s

On a serious note, using fewer datatypes is super helpful for any kind of serialization.

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Until someone decides one data type is good enough and everything is a string.

But note that larger datatypes are viral in the same way C++ const is.

Fewer datatypes. “Less” should be used when you’re talking about a qualitative measure, “fewer” when talking quantitatively.

This message is sponsored by your friendly neighborhood grammar nazi.

Thanks a bunch, Der Fewer...

They're both quantitative. "quantitative" doesn't necessarily mean "discrete".

The usual way to refer to this distinction is uncountable vs. countable nouns.

Fixed, thanks for the heads up.

Indeed; I misread that sentence the first time through and was briefly puzzled.

Thanks, Stannis.

This is not a thing. There are no rigid rules for using less or fewer.

And the rigid rule that daft old prescriptivits insist on seems to have come from some random writer in 1770 going "I think this sounds better in this instance".

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h...

May I direct you to Language Log, a blog of professional linguists and grammarians whose archives will be only too happy to disabuse you of this daft old prescriptivist nonsense?

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=less+fewer

I still can't get over people saying "I need to drink fewer milk."

Nope, it's less. You can use "less few" if a naked less bothers you. "Fewer" is not a real word - if it were, then we would also use "manyer" as its antonym. And before you go off saying I'm wrong, let me remind you that language evolves as its speakers will it to. You are speaking English, you can decide to change it however you want and nobody can claim you're wrong. Whether your change sticks or not is a different matter...

Less applies to uncountable things, fewer applies to countable things.

This article explains there is significantly more nuance to it than that: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/fewer-vs-less

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