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> =============
> This is from _The New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style
> and Usage_, copyright 1994:
> data. The plural verb is always appropriate with the word
> *data*, which is the plural of *datum*. This usage is in
> transition, however, and technical writers increasingly use a
> singular verb with *data* to indicate a body of statistics. "The
> data proves" may be correct someday, but careful writers have
> not yet adopted it.
> I'm withholding personal opinion, which is in transition. :)
I won't withhold mine...based more or less on "growing up" with computers and
spending 5 years in university studying computer science. I have always thought
of data as singular. I sense there is bit of a generation gap on this issue,
and I've also noticed that the software industry seems to use data in the
singular sense while in science and engineering, data as plural still seems
to rule. That's been my experience, anyway.
