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The interesting thing with 'not' is that in case of 'must', 'not' does not apply to 'must', but the thing it is referring to. E. g. in 'You must not do' the 'not' applies to 'do', not 'must'
Whereas in case of 'have to', using 'not' results in a logical negation of 'have to': 'You don't have to' means the same as 'Its not true that you have to'
Therefore you could say that in case you want to forbid something, you should always use 'must' and 'not', because 'have to' and 'not' doesn't express the same. Unless, of course, you choose to be precise on what to negate: 'You have to not do' would work syntactically and semantically. But I don't think I've ever seen or heard such a phrase in english. 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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In Norwegian, it depends on where you put the stress: You must not do it ("Du må ikke gjøre det") vs. You must not do it ("Du må ikke gjøre det") - I guess the difference in meaning is approximately the same in English as in Norwegian. In writing, highlighting with italics, underlining or boldface may, for a variety of reasons be undesirable, so you may be missing a way to indicate your intetion.
We have other cases similar to your example. You need not do it ("Du trenger ikke gjøre det") would never be considered a negation of "do it", but of "need" (so it behaves differently from "must"). Moving on to "can", you can have a whole series of meanings depending on the stress, and the "not" ("Du kan [ikke] gjøre det"):
You can climb that wall. (maybe the others can't)
You can climb that wall (if you just do your best)
You can climb that wall (wow! I didn't know that)
You can not climb that wall (you are not old enough)
You can not climb that wall (stop pretending that you can)
You can not climb that wall (I do not allow you to do it)
You can not climb that wall (that would be just crazy)
and so on. (Depending on context, the interpretation may be somewhat different.)
I have met immigrants who have learned to speak Norwegian almost completely free of accent, but they reveal themselves as non-native speakers by not mastering the meaning of all stress patterns, or by the word order: Two alternatives may both be valid, but with somewhat different meanings, often when "not" is involved: I am not planning to go to London, vs. I am planning not to go to London.
I heard Vera Henriksen, author of Viking age novels and prominent translator of old Norse litterature to modern Norwegian, talk about the problems of translating the poetry: The Norse language (like modern German) made use of seveal cases, i.e. inflected forms to indicate e.g. the role of an actor. We have got a few traces of it left: He hit him, or Him he hit. In the Norse poetry, you have great freedom in the word order, and the poetic rythm depends on it. But in a direct translation to modern Norwegian, the same word order is illegal, meaningless or has a different meaning. If you reorder it according to modern grammatical rules, the rythm is completely ruined. It takes a skilled author to do an honest translation, rather than to re-invent the text!
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Great example. But you shouldn't forget:
You can not climb that wall (maybe another one?)
At least, sometimes interpunctuation comes to the rescue when you need to resolve an ambiguity:
"Let's eat, grandpa" is fine, but
"Let's eat grandpa" is cannibalistic 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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I saw a ruder example - captializing or not: "I'm helping my uncle Jack off the horse" ...
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I think you are missing the point. I took Sander's frustration not as a complaint that there is such an option that can be turned off, but treating this as a mere matter of "consise-ness", while the two alternatives in fact convey quite different meanings.
Sander emphasizes that he is writing British English, and he wants his word processor to treat as British English - not as American English where you have turned off the mechanisms that doesn't work properly in BE.
Just for the records: If you translate "have to" word by word to Norwegian, "Du har å gjøre det!", it is a strict order to someone who objects to it, "Do it, or else ...". Certainly, word by word tranlations from one language to the other can lead to crazy results. AE and BE are different languages. Closer than AE and Norwegian, yet different.
I come to think of the old joke:
- Daddy, why do they call it a "Word processor"?
- Well, son ... You've seen what food processors do to food...
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Does changing your language to English (U.K.) not work? (Click on the language down on the status bar.)
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That's what I thought, but when I checked the list of languages, there was only one selection for English - no English(UK) or similar. MSDN didn't indicate it exists either.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Really? Mine has 18 different kinds of English. Weird
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Ah, found 'em! I must have looked in the wrong place. Only 16 kinds here, but it's Office 2013. 
I've also found Swiss German, and that appears to be solving my problem with that unwanted autocorrection using ß. 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Stefan_Lang wrote: Only 16 kinds here, but it's Office 2013.
Stefan_Lang wrote: I've also found Swiss German, and that appears to be solving my problem with that unwanted autocorrection using ß.
Well... it took only 7 years (at least) to find out and solve your problem
I really whish you don't have to look for "grammar" options in Intellisense 
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Be very careful with "have to", because it implies a higher power.
Good examples:
- You have to obey the speed limit (because the law says so).
- You have to do your homework (because your teacher says so).
- You have to charge your phone battery (because the laws of Physics say so).
- You have to fill in fields marked with asterisks (because the form won't work if you don't).
Only one bad example is needed:
- You have to do what I want (because I am a higher power, and am far more important than you).
If you are not a higher power, the reaction will be along the lines of "He's an arrogant little shite, that one!"
i.e. don't tell customers (or anyone else) that they "have to" do something that's for your benefit.
"Must", as you say, implies "for your benefit":
- You must book your flight early (because it fills up pretty quickly).
However, we also have a "gentle" imperative, which can be used for either case, but is less pushy:
- You need to get that finished by the end of the week (because I/you/we/they need it).
But if you want to be really co-operative, go reflexive:
- I need you to help me peeling these grapes.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Interesting examples.
I and a couple of coworkers do support for our software (answering email when we have time and such). I'm not a native English speaker; my coworkers are, but I always go out of my way in my responses to customers to discuss "the problem", whereas my coworkers might use "your problem". I've always thought "your problem" had a rather strong undertone suggesting a customer was having problems because of his own doing...whereas "the problem" is more neutral.
I've mentioned it to my coworkers, but they don't see it that way at all. I'm concluded maybe it's just me and my French background (in French, "ton probleme" is very informal and infers "you're the only one seeing that"), but I still avoid using "your problem" in correspondence with customers...
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Well, tell your cow-orkers that an expert has said that they have to say it your way.
I'd be horrified to see support messages insultingly talking of "your problem" to customers, as if it were their fault.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I was working in a team where one guy was born of a scottish mother (but he had grown up in Norway), and one Norwegian lady who had for thirty years been working as a top level secretary of international French companies with a high reputation. The American in the team once remarked to me that you could easily hear that Ellen is not a native English speaker: She speaks (/writes) perfect English! Robert, a (semi-)native English speaker, makes those small slips and grammatical errors "natural" for a native speaker. Not perfect, the way Ellen spoke.
Then, for the question of what is "perfect":
The team with Robert and Ellen also included an English lady, the American lady and an Australian guy - all grown up with English as their primary language. I was going to give a presentation in English, and was unsure about my choice of preposition in one of the slides, so I asked the English lady. No, no - that is not the right one, you must write ...". The Australian overheard that, but didn't accept Linda's correction, he made a different suggestion. That made the American lady stand up: Don't listen to Linda or Alex, it should be ... (unfortunately, I can't remember the different proposals). The three went into a verbal dogfight, all of insisting that the other two proposals were just wrong. The only thing they could agree on is that my first suggestion coudn't be used. I just let them fight (neither of them ever gave in), but silently selected the proposal from the English lady, as the company at that time officially did their documentation in British English.
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So pretty much a normal day, then.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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"The problem", "the issue", "what you're seeing"...I'm always willing, in my correspondence with customers, to shift the problem on us rather than something they're doing, even if nobody else has reported anything wrong. "Your problem" just so obviously sounds condescending to me.
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Exactly. Never forget that they're paying good money for service, so they should get good -- and, at very least, polite -- service.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Good point. As a german I'd see it the same as you do. 'Your' implies that it's not the same for 'me'. Moreover, when a client reports a problem, and they have a maintenance contract, then it becomes 'our problem' too!
That said, assuming you're talking about your software, it may suffer from many problems, so you still might want to say 'your problem' in order to clarify that you're talking about the problem of the client, rather than your problem to get all those bugs fixed, or whatever
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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These kinds of concern are important.
But, they are highly language and culture dependent. For this discussion, we certainly must (/have to) treat British and American English as distinct languages. Even within the Norwegian language, native to about 5 mill people, you see large variations among dialects. The are cases of word pairs that swaps meanings from one dialect to the other ("brød" is "bread" in one dialect, "cake" in another, while "kake" is the other way around, same with "kirsebær" and "moreller" - which is the sweet cherry, which is the sour kind). Sometimes, a single word in one dialect takes a sentence to represent in other dialects: In Trøndelag, where I live now, I could ask if you know some person, and you might answer "Æ vætt'a 'n, ja", which says "I know who he is, but I have never have any personal contact with him". In my own south Norway dialect, there is no single term (literally: "I know of him") that expresses that kind of relationship.
One of my language books has illustration of where different European languages (as determined by gallups from speakers of those languages) sets the limits between yellow and orange, red, green, blue, violet, ... The differences are surprisingly large, even within Europe (which you might think is reasonably homogenous from a cultural point of view). Another case study in the same book is personal relations: How close is a "friend"? A "buddy"? An "acquaintance"? The dictionary provides translations, but on closer inspection it turns out that, say, the Norwegian terms "venn", "kamerat" and "bekjent" cover significantly different sectors of the social scale than the Amerian terms.
When I first visited the USA as a teenager, of course I was familiar with "girlfriend"s and "boyfriend"s, and was confused when my host family referred to my buddies as my boyfriends. When I asked, they explained that the boyfriend of a girl is quite different from a boyfriend of a boy. But, I asked, what do you then call it when two boys are sweethearts? That shocked my Catholic, Midwestern host family deeply. The reaction was like Russian: We do not have such perverts in our society! It wasn't phrased exactly that way, but the meaning was the same. So I learned not to take lightly on taking words from one cultural context to another.
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No argument here. Things like the partial role reversal of "horrible" and "terrible" in English and US English are what I use to highlight the problem (English "I feel terrible" = US English "I feel horrible", but the nuance is wrong if you say them in the wrong place).
Here, have some practice with perfect English[^].
The only major English/US English difference in the have to/need to/must phrases, though, is that US English tends to use "have got to" in place of "have to" more frequently, because US English has more of an emphasis on "got" being used for unwanted or negative things.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Sander Rossel wrote: I have to use the Azure cloud at work
IMHO, that's not professional. I would rewrite that as "I am required to use the Azure cloud at work".
/ravi
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: IMHO
Well, I'm glad it's a humble opinion, because it's incorrect.
I think almost everyone here is well aware that verbosity is not a sign of professionalism.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Verbosity depens on which verbs (and nouns, and adjectives) are used. If they are of "current buzzword" kind, they could signify "professionalism".
Noone would arrest you today for using the term "agile" in statements where it could just as well have been left out. Same with "open source". Same with a lot of buzzwords. They contribute nothing to the informtion value, except telling that the author knows which are the current buzzwords.
Also, an important aspect of professionalism is precision. If you tell that "I am required to" use a given tool, then there is an explicitly stated requirement. If you tell "I must" use some tool, it could be that anything else is too slow on given hardware, that your colleagues are not familiar with other tools, that alternatives are too expensive, ... it could be anything, maybe formal and maybe not. If there is a stated requirement (from the customer, or from the management) to use a given tool, then that is essential. You can't blur it, smear it out, by reducing it to a diffuse "must".
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Well put.
/ravi
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