Definite or indefinite article for non-singletons?

[MRAB]

On 2019-07-29 00:04, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 5:36 PM Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>> So it depends on the context if the relevant equivalence is "is" or
>> "==". Maybe the rule of thumb is that if we are talking about strings,
>> integers and similar things, we should think about it from the point of
>> view of Python's data model (objects; "is"). But when we talk about
>> things like "length", "square root", "sum" or "name", the point of view
>> is the abstractions the objects are standing for ("==").
> 
> Interesting. So in your view, a string object representing zero
> characters is "an", but its length is "the"? I'd have thought that
> both are considered value types, where identity is immaterial.
> 
There can be multiple empty strings, which the implementation _might_ 
optimise to a singleton, but each string has only one length.

A string of length > 1 has multiple characters, each being _a_ 
character, but the string as a whole has only one length, so we can call 
it _the_ length.

> Thanks for all the insights, all. This is a curious point of English
> and one that I've definitely seen people on both sides of.
> 
> My apologies for not responding earlier or to individual posts. For a
> while (and I'm actually not certain that this post will make it), all
> Gmail addresses have been unable to post to python-list, and even
> contacting the list-owner wasn't possible.
>