English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Do the rules on conditional constructions depend in any way on whether the main-clause is in negative?
Here is one example:
We are trying to write-down all the steps, so that if another person wants to work on the code a year from now, they will not need to re-do everything from scratch.
Does the application of "will not" sound natural in the above sentence?
The example from ther question:
We are trying to write-down all the steps, so that if another person wants to work on the code a year from now, they will not need to re-do everything from scratch.
is perfectly natural. A fluent speaker might well say or write this, and would understand it. That the sentence is framed in a negative way does not affect the form of the conditional. If this is reworded to a positive phrasing, such as:
We are trying to write-down all the steps, so that if another person wants to work on the code a year from now, they will be able to easily understand the existing structure.
the conditional form is unchanged.
