Thanks for the reference. I've read it now. I'm relieved to
discover it does not recommend or assign a meaning to the
phrase "MAY NOT".
Wherever "MAY NOT" appears in a (so-called) spec, it either
means "MUST NOT" or it means "MAY OR MAY NOT", which is a
synonym for "MAY", and which, as I remarked earlier, is
formally equivalent to omitting the sentence.
>
>> I don't much like "may" either. Everything is permitted
>> unless the specification prohibits it, a sentence whose
main
>> verb is "may" therefore says nothing.
>
>*Everything*? So if a specification for a C compiler
doesn't
>*say* that compiling a strictly conforming program does
*not*
>make demons fly out of your nose, then the compiler is
allowed
>to do that?
Absolutely. It might not succeed in the market, but it would
conform to the spec.
(As did an early Algol68 compiler I once used whose only
error message was "<filename> is not a program". Which, come
to think of it, is not that far removed from the behaviour
of some XML parsers I have used...)
Mike Kay