>
> Capitalization can do this too.  It is less common, but still  
> possible:
>
> "The sign outside the shoe shine shop read "do not bring polish in,
> please"."  Here, the sign says you can't bring in competing products.
>
> "The sign outside the shoe shine shop read "do not bring Polish in,
> please"."  Here, the sign excludes customers based on nationality.  (I
> do not want to get back to the "cultural disagreements" part of the
> conversation; this is just the easiest example to construct.)

Thank you.  Yet another idiosincracy of English.

This (to my knowledge) cannot happen in Spanish, as we don't capitalize
'Polish' or its equivalent.

But you have to admit that it is pretty contrived [*], and if only  
one of the two were
presented to me, I would probably misread it.

[*] It fundamentally relies on 'polish' vs. 'Polish' being written  
the same way even
though they are pronounced differently.
But then, an ambiguous example can probably be constructed when it is
the first word in a sentence, and we clearly want no ambiguity in  
programming
languages.





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