Timeline for Confused by the past tense and the present tense
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 5, 2012 at 15:38 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | In that case I think I'd definitely use present tense for what the "current, soon to become obsolete" system does. | |
| Oct 5, 2012 at 8:46 | history | edited | RegDwigнt |
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| Oct 5, 2012 at 7:01 | comment | added | pjhades | Thanks for your answer first. In fact I'm writing some notes about my development of a system. I'd like to describe the old design and what the system will do in the old scheme, so ... it's not too far away from now, I think the present tense is OK. | |
| Oct 5, 2012 at 6:46 | vote | accept | pjhades | ||
| Oct 5, 2012 at 6:10 | answer | added | Merk | timeline score: 4 | |
| Oct 5, 2012 at 6:01 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/254098939169624065 | ||
| Oct 5, 2012 at 5:30 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | The tense really depends on context. If you replaced foo by something like "pig-iron production", within which context the bar method is some crude technique that hasn't been used for centuries, you'd probably use past tense. But if foo is a statistical analysis model that until last year was normally implemented using a bar method that the speaker is about to lecture on for the next hour, he'll probably use present tense. Tenses are slippery things - they even let me end that last sentence with future tense. | |
| Oct 5, 2012 at 5:17 | review | First posts | |||
| Oct 5, 2012 at 8:46 | |||||
| Oct 5, 2012 at 5:14 | history | asked | pjhades | CC BY-SA 3.0 |