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There is a joke that perfectly illustrates this entire article:

A programmers wife asks him, "Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk, and if they have eggs, buy a dozen."

The programmer returns home, and his wife is very angry with him. "Why did you buy twelve cartons of milk?!"

English SE question detailing the linguistic mechanisms: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40234/bring-6-egg...



Also,

>> At some point I hope to have computer systems I can program by voice in English, as in "House? Could you wake me up at 7?"

> Yeah, well, I fear the answer will be yes (it could), but it won't do so since you haven't asked it to wake you up, only if it could.

From an exchange on python-list, https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-October/1...


Wow, the examples in the SE discussion are awesome. I was aware of some of these linguistic issues, but the examples really underscore how subtle pragmatics can be. (The examples give completely syntactically parallel sentences that are pragmatically resolved in opposite ways.)


Wouldn't this imply that the "buy" instruction is stateful?


No. It's just the implied object of the second "buy" which is ambiguous.


But then the programmer would come home empty handed, without even buying the milk.




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