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I 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




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