Kerim Aydin wrote:
>Anything particularly evil about this?
Not directly so, but it would encourage bad drafting. We already have a
fair bit of trouble with people not thinking through the CAN and the SHALL
as distinct items, and we hardly ever want them to have the same extent.
I don't think there's anywhere that we actually want plain "CAN do X by
announcement and SHALL do X", so a shorthand for it would cause trouble.
You ameliorated this issue somewhat by the asap clause, so that "MANDATED
to X" without an explicit time limit is a shorthand for something that's
actually useful. But I think it's broken for explicit time limits.
This whole class of situation needs some more attention.
I think you intended that "MANDATED to X within 4 days" would mean "CAN
do X by announcement, and SHALL do X within 4 days", but it's actually
ambiguous. By one very obvious parsing (MANDATED to {X within 4 days})
it applies the time limit to the CAN as well. By another, the capacity
and obligation only endure for the time limit ({MANDATED to X} within 4
days). To do the useful thing, "MANDATED" needs to be a more structured
shorthand: the definition needs to explicitly pull out the time limit
from its invocation and put that in the SHALL clause but not the CAN.
-zefram
