Monday, February 4, 2019

prepositions - "parameterized by" vs. "parameterized with"



Assuming that you are writing American English, which preposition follows "parameterized" in the following example: by or with? Why?




Our model of programs is parameterized by/with the deliberately abstract concepts of integers, registers, stack, and heap.



If you feel you need to write "parametrized", dropping one "e", please do so.


Answer



If you want to be very precise, then "by" is better because the sentence is passive voice and traditionally "by" is the preposition used to indicate the agent of a passive voice sentence. If you use "with" then the sentence is, technically speaking, turned into "middle voice". Compare the feel of "The meat was cut by the knife" to "The meat was cut with the knife (by me)". So, "with" in this kind of context expresses a tool used by an agent, where the agent may be only implied whereas "by" denotes the agent of the action. However in everyday language the usage is often conflated.


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