At 2014-08-12 22:27, Paul Eggert wrote:
... To try to head this dispute off at the pass the attached new patch (pushed into the experimental version) rewords everything so that the word "data" is never used in a context that requires it to be plural, or that requires it to be plural either.
Re-casting is usually the best solution, IMO. nGrams* surprisingly (to me anyway) shows the plural being favored (over 2:1 in 1980), but getting closer (9:8 in 2007). British English favors the plural more. Fiction favors it less, to the point of being in the minority for a couple years in the early 2000s. I don't know what types of books are missing from these corpuses (corpii? :) ) though. Like other respondents, I have the sense that current IT literature favors the mass noun. * https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=data+is%2Cdata+are%2Cdata+does... -- Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+TZ_IANA@Earthlink.net>