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Nil return

Sbonke

Senior Member
France, French
Hello,

We have asked a number of companies to give us the names of the people they would send to attend different meetings. I am compiling the results of this enquiry for each meeting. I would like to differentiate those who have not answered at all (no answer) and those who have answered for some of the meetings, but not all. I was toying with the idea of using "nil return" for those. No anwer vs nil return, would that be explicit? Any other idea?

Many, many thanks in advance for your help.

Sbonke
Hi

If data can be misinterpreted, it will be. It might be worth adding a key in the notes of the report:
No answer = No answer for this specific question
Nil return = Company did not respond to questionnaire

Cheers
Neal Mc
I see. Excellent. I will use "no answer" when I don't have the answer for one of the meetings and "no return" when the company did not answer the questionnaire at all.
Thank you!!
If your company offers technology products, you may wish to avoid the phrase 'nil return' as this has a specific programming meaning. If a program returns nil, a routine provides an answer, but the answer is 'nothing' or 'zero'. Also, this can mean a tax return that is completed with all values as 'zero'.

In both cases, you get an answer, but the answer is 'zero', which isn't the same as getting no answer. Why not say 'no response', 'no reply', or 'not in attendance'?

EDIT: Nil is used with Pascal, some versions of C, and other languages, while null is used with SQL servers, VBasic, etc. Nil is also used some in network languages. The general idea is very similar, but there are variations from language to language.
Last edited:
Thank for your input Cypherpunk. There is not programming interference in my context, so that's ok.
My problem is that I have two "no response" which may mean different things: if the company has not responded to the questionnaire, we just don't know whether they will send delegates or not; if the company has responded to the questionnaire, but failed to indicate a name for a particular meeting, it is likely that there will be no delegate to that meeting, but it could also indicate that they have not yet reached a decision and we could still have a delegate later on. This led me to "Not attending TBC" for these partial answers. I think that works well for my purpose.
Thanks again to all.
Hi

On the basis of the additional context.
1 Attendance TBC (no response to meeting request)
2 No Response (no response to questionnaire)

TBC'ing non-attendance is a bit unusual.

Cheers
Neal Mc
"Nil" is almost exclusively a British usage, although understood by Americans. The AE equivalent of "Nil return" would be "No return," "No reply," or "No response." If you wanted to be optimistic, you could say "Response pending" or "Response expected" to differentiate between people who have not replied and those who have said they are definitely not coming. The only uses of "nil" in the U.S. that I am aware of are by pretentious sports casters reporting soccer scores (evidently, because of its use for that purpose in Britain; but they still call the sport "soccer," not "football," and use "zero" or "nothing" for the scores in other sports) and the colloquial stock phrase "chances are nil" to indicate a low or zero probability.

If your audience or readers are mostly British or Commonwealth, go with "nil"; if they are mostly American, use "no" (which I am sure the non-American minority will understand as readily as the Americans will understand "nil").
Thanks all for the additional information and suggestions, very helpful.
Sbonke
A "Nil return" is not the same as no return, no reply, no response.
It is an explicit return/reply/response indicating no interest.

Sbonke's initial suggestion of distinguishing between those who didn't answer and those who submitted a nil return saying they were not intending to send anyone is exactly the way this expression is used. In my world, no further explanation would be necessary.

(I have not heard of "nil" in a technology context. I wonder is Cypherpunk thinking of "null"?)
Apologies to all in Panjandrum's world, but I find the term "nil return" completely confusing in this context and I don't think I would be the only one.
I would get a poor impression of the report writer from this use of jargon.

I would like to differentiate those who have not answered at all (no answer) and those who have answered for some of the meetings, but not all.

Neal Mc has some reasonable suggestions for how to get this across.
New Zealand
Definition: A nil return is where you file a tax return with all of the numbers simply completed as ‘nil’. The return is still required to be filed with Inland Revenue to advise them that there have been no transactions for that period.

United Kingdom
Well HMRC have just announced a new on line service to make a nil return – really easy to use and saves them chasing you.

Australia
This version of our nil return form does not allow you to save your work and complete at a later time.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

On looking around, I see that the version of "nil return" that I described is used a very great deal and, for example, should be familiar to every tax-payer in the countries that I have mentioned
I agree with Panj. A 'nil return' is a term (presumably BrE?) to refer to a response that indicates that nobody is interested in the event. I habitually see this in work related stuff (eg someone send a message to a secretary to ask if anyone in the department is interested in an available grant: the secretary is asked to submit a 'nil return' if no-one is interested, so that, for eample, the sender can send reminders to those who don't reply, and not to those who have indicated no interest.) Presumably not common outside the office context (no. 11), and might not be clear to Americans (no. 8)? You need to check who your receivers are then.
There are some very clear examples of the meaning and usage of 'nil return' in this thread. I may as well explain my initial interpretation of the original post, in case anyone else read it the way I did.

Sbonke intends using the phrase where respondents
... have answered for some of the meetings, but not all

which according to the phrasing of the original post I interpreted to mean a mixture of replies, not a complete set of zero responses.
'Nil return' would be an inaccurate label for a report category summarising or tabulating replies which were a mixture of 'some yes' and 'some no'. In this case it would be a poor use of jargon.

If the information was broken down to a more detailed level, and the 'some no' information was handled separately from the 'some yes', then 'nil return' would - as Panjandrum and natkretep have rightly said - explicitly differentiate between "no answer" and "answered: no".
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