tense

tense

Grammatical tense refers to the conjugation of a verb to reflect its place in time—that is, when the action occurred.

There are technically only two grammatical tenses in English: the past and the present. Verbs in their basic form inherently describe the present time, and they can be conjugated into a unique form that describes the past. We can then use auxiliary verbs and verb participles to create different aspects of the past and present tenses, which describe if an action is or was continuous, or if it began at an earlier point in the past.

However, verbs do not have a specific conjugated form to reflect the future, and, for this reason, English is considered not to have a true future tense.

Nevertheless, although English has no future tense in the strict sense, we commonly refer to several structures that are used for future meaning as belonging to the “future tense.” The most common of these structures begin with will or be going to.

tense

Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly bummed, but sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student hacker at CMU: "This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes." A tense programmer is one who produces tense code.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)