On Mon, 2017-08-28 at 17:16 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > The report must "include the fact that the list is empty". I think, > in plain language, this must be something like a sentence "there are no > non-default values for the X switch." Otherwise the fact is not "included."
I agree that this is a requirement on the report. What I'm less clear on is what happens when the requirement is not met. Does it cause the entire report to not be a report? If not, we have a report that contains some of the information it's meant to contain, and not other information. Say a report is meant to contain list A and list B, but only actually appears to contain list A. There are two possible sets of requirements for what the report was meant to contain, based on whether list B is empty or not: * Nonempty list A, nonempty list B * Nonempty list A, empty list B, statement that list B is empty As for what subset of the report was actually posted, only being able to see list A in the report then gives us three possibilities for what was present and what was missing: * Nonempty list A, [missing: nonempty list B] * Nonempty list A, [missing: empty list B, statement that list B is empty] * Nonempty list A, empty list B, [missing: statement that list B is empty] I can't see any reason why list B wouldn't self-ratify in the third case here. The problem is, there's no way from the text of the email to distinguish it from the second, as they're both textually exactly the same. -- ais523
