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Comment by egwynn | Hacker News Reader

> In a sane world where everyone used the Oxford comma ...

Serial commas can also create ambiguity when they resemble appositives[1]. There’s no single rule that always only ever eliminates ambiguity for these things besides treating English like math and flooding it with parentheses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Creating_ambiguit...

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Hmmm... I vote for writing English in direct AST syntax to avoid these ambiguities.

I actually tend to use curly braces as 'ambiguity braces', when a term is ambiguous. They've met with some amount of success.

Would you show an example?

  a, b, c, or d

  a, b, {c or d}

  a, b, c or {d}

  a, {b or c}, d

If only I knew for sure which of the entries on the wikipedia disambiguation page for ‘AST’[1] you were talking about! /s

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AST

(agree (with (I you)))

Shouldn't it be: (agree I (with you))?

Beats me, English grammar isn't my strong suit.

I would write it (agree I you) since it is similar to a conjunction - the "with" is implied.

Quite true in general but I'd hope that legal documents would tend to avoid appositives since they tend to introduce confusion and legalese isn't known for prizing brevity.

Is there a situation where it resembles an appositive which isn't a matter of verifiable fact? In the example "To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God" a court could go check and see if the speaker's mother is in fact Ayn Rand. Whereas in this court case, the ambiguity is an unresolvable one.

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