In English, there are generally two ways of describing quantities: mass nouns, and count nouns. Count nouns are used when the quantity in question is a set of discrete items. “There are twelve bananas.” Here, ‘bananas’ functions as a count noun, which is appropriate because you can clearly tell where one banana ends and the next begins. In contrast, mass nouns are used when the quantity is continuous and not divisible into countable units. “There are twelve peanut butters,” for example, does not make sense. What constitutes a single “peanut butter”? Unlike with a count noun, a unit is required to refer to a specific quantity of a mass noun, even if the unit is implicit, such interpreting the previous example to mean “There are twelve jars of peanut butter.”

This brings me to the word “code”.

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