From kragen@dnaco.net Wed Sep 23 10:28:31 1998 Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 10:28:29 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen X-Sender: kragen@pike To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" cc: talk@clug.org Subject: Re: Menus in Emacs (... with better grammar) In-Reply-To: <19980922230013.N27200@ebb.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 2093 Status: O X-Status: On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Thus spoke Jim Weirich: > > Arg! Bad english, a double negative and the wrong tense of the verb, > > all in one sentence. Kinda ruins the effectiveness of my stunning > > reply. Sigh :-( > > > > Jim> You just told me to quit my job because they don't supplied > > Jim> me with the software that doesn't work. > > > > Should read ... > > > > You just told me to quit my job because they supply me with > > working software. > > > > Hmmm ... I think I like the double negative. Lends more "oomph" to > > the statement ... > > > > You just told me to quit my job because they don't supply me with > > non-working software. It's the good old negation altering quantifiers again. The two statements mean different things, by my reading. "They supply me with working software" means that there exists some software X such that X works and they supply you with X. "They supply me with non-working software" means that there exists some software Y such that Y doesn't work and they supply you with Y. "They don't supply me with non-working software" means that there exists no software Y such that Y doesn't work and they supply you with Y. That is, for any software Z such that they supply you with Z, it is not the case that Z doesn't work. (This doesn't imply that the set Z is nonempty.) So the two statements are not equivalent. The first statement, "They supply me with working software", means that they supply you with some software that works. It allows the possibility that they also supply you with junkware that doesn't work. The second statement. "They don't supply me with non-working software", means that if they supply you any software, it works. It allows the possibility that they don't supply you with any software at all. (I still don't understand what either statement has to do with what Brad said. I thought he said you should quit your job because they didn't supply you with the ideal software environment, without regard to whether various parts of the one you have works or not.) Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker The sages do not believe that making no mistakes is a blessing. They believe, rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new man of himself. -- Wang Yang-Ming