Definite or indefinite article for non-singletons?

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 10:06 AM Richard Damon <Richard at damon-family.org> wrote:
> When talking of empty strings, we need to look a bit at context.  "The
> empty string" implies that there is only one of them, and if we are
> talking about values, then there is only one empty string values, so
> "The empty string value" would be correct (and the term value might be
> implied by context). If we are talking about object, like with the
> python word "is", then the empty string is not promised to be a
> singleton, so grammatically, it should be "A empty string object", and
> again the term object might be implied by the context.

So I guess the original question can be reworded as:

When you're describing indistinguishable objects, are you really
talking about objects, or are you talking about values?

With numbers, it's pretty obvious that you talk about values. You can
logically say "if the spamminess is zero, blah blah blah" even though
you'd actually say "if spam == 0:" in the code. With strings, is it
therefore logical to say "is the empty string" even though you'd
actually be comparing to see if it "==" another empty string?

ChrisA