Dave Cridland wrote:
A SHOULD X unless Y essentially means "SHOULD (X or Y)"
I'd read it as "do X, but if you have a very good excuse
not doing X might do. One known very good excuse is Y."
OTOH for a MUST X I'd want no qualifiers, MUST means "an
attempt to do not X can cause havoc."
This is also about a readability, I had a serious case of
DEnglish some days ago, an article was tagged with a note:
"This article may contain no original research". I read
this as "apparently there is no original research in this
article", which would be perfectly fine wrt the linked
guideline. Only much later it occured to me that I got
the "may ... not ..." wrong.
If Y is the *only* possible very good excuse your version
"MUST X or Y, SHOULD X" is clear. But SHOULD X often has
an implicitly known very good excuse: Any older software
written before the SHOULD X was approved.
Frank
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