On Mon, 2017-09-04 at 17:20 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > > On Tue, 5 Sep 2017, Alex Smith wrote: > > On Mon, 2017-09-04 at 17:02 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > > > You *could* read "I pay X to do Y" as a conditional, as in "I pay X, and > > > if it doesn't make Y happen, I don't pay X". But that's not official in > > > the rules. > > > > Transferring shinies to Agora and creating a Stamp as a result is > > defined in rule 2498 as a type of action by announcement. So you do it > > by saying that you do it. > > If I say "I pay 100 shinies to Agora in order to fly to the moon" > would it transfer or not - what do you think?
With "I pay 100 shinies to Agora to fly to the moon", I'd interpret that as an attempt to take a nonexistent action by announcement, which fails; the only action-by-announcement that could possibly fit is "An asset generally CAN be transferred…" in rule 2166, and that doesn't seem clear enough that it is referring to that action that it would unambiguously be a transfer of 100 shinies. With "I pay 100 shinies to Agora in order to fly to the moon", it's less obvious in my mind, as the "in order to" makes it look more like an expected consequence of an action rather than part of an action. > (But I take your point: the stamps rule in particular is clearer than some > of the other things that you can do by "spending", which isn't well-defined, > I'd been looking through several of them to see the different wording). Regardless of what "I transfer the Stamp Value in shinies to Agora to create a Stamp" would mean in the absence of rule 2498, I believe that rule 2498 redefines the phrase to have a specific meaning. Rules are capable of affecting language like that. So this is a different case from the "fly to the moon" case, because something that looks sort-of- like the rule 2498 action and sort-of-like the rule 2166 action is at best ambiguous as to which action it's trying to take. -- ais523
