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This is amusing but absurd, especially if you're serious about this phrase being confusing or malformed. "You may not smoke": does this mean, to you, that eithe
by adriand 10y ago
This is amusing but absurd, especially if you're serious about this phrase being confusing or malformed. "You may not smoke": does this mean, to you, that either smoking or not smoking is permitted? If the answer is yes, I think the solution may be to cease applying the logical rules of programming to human languages, where it is meaning and tradition that matter.
- mistersquid 10y agoI was going to write that the answer your question is "no" because your version is unambiguous but then I parsed it a few more times. One way to remove the ambiguity is to recast your sentence using "must": "You must not smoke". But that version is stilted to most modern English speakers raised outside the UK. This side-discussion is probably one of the reasons people wish HN had collapsible threads, so after this comment I will refrain from further contributing to it. (Nice job, btw, on highlighting the ambiguity in a version where the negative is in the predicate.) EDIT: grammar