just fucking add one if/temary to show the "s" or not. please for fuck sake. its not thaat hard and maybe takes one minuten if youre slow

Says a person who doesn't use Shift and apostrophe.

@gronostaj i just dont care enough

(if you try to use this as a counter or something, this is not a commercial product)

Plus, while this is English, rules may be more complicated in a different language. Imagine the added work for multilingual software.

Better to reformulate… Number of primary key fields: 1

@SomeNone Good point, but the error messages will stay in English anyway.

I like the second approach

Just make it like my example(s) and that’s fine enough

@SomeNone Indeed, your reformulation is the correct one, for information should be stated in the nominative case (y is part of x) rather than the active case (y is doing x), which allows for objective information such as in this case.

@CaptainRant Good for y.

This doesn't work if you localise. First, it's a pain in the ass to make 2 localised strings, secondly you have to check if the current culture even has plurals, thirdly there's probably other gotchas in other languages you don't know about.

Just make one string. This isn't worth all the logic it takes to get it perfect. The user knows what 1 fields means. Say field(s) if you're really concerned about it

@M3m35terJ05h You don't even have to travel far, it'll already blow up in Italian, where 'field' is 'campo' but 'fields' is 'campi'…

@fischtisch "i just don't care enough"

The irony is fuckin palpable holy shit

Plot twist:

print(`The primary key consists of ${n-1} ${getTriggeringPluralizationBasedOnCulture(n)})`

@SortOfTested At that point, I’d rather just do
print(„Problems occoured“)

Just rename it to [ERROR4598G]

Then add an enterprise tier to your SaaS product where people need to contact a sales rep to understand the pricing, but includes a 24/7 phone support SLA, so they can ask a confused outsourced support employee what the error code means.

For people who want to use the free tier, you create a PDF ebook manual with the error codes, and put it up for sale on Amazon for $9.99.

@M3m35terJ05h I agree on the "field(s)", it's easier and the users would understand that anyway.

Why?

@SortOfTested n-1*
Just kiddkng.