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CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

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Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#81

Post by _visgean »

medstrom wrote: post #58
t2b1 wrote: post #34

Completely unrelated to Catalan (Català), the language spoken in Catalonia (Catalunya). I think if someone wants to google a question about this, "catala language beginner hello world" won't help them much.

I can only conclude that they didn't know that. It's such a bad name; we won't even be able to google "catala lang" because ... Catala is also a "lang"! Imagine someone creates a programming language called Russian. Good luck googling "russian lang".

given that the major contributors seems to be from paris / bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#82

Post by victorbjorklund »

kstrauser wrote: post #30

I think what I'd rather see is a standardize test suite format for laws that spells out the intentions. Once I lived in a state that proposed a very simple anti-child porn law with good intent, but it was too simple. It read sort of like "anyone sending explicit pictures of minors from a cell phone will be guilty of conveying child porn". It was written in the proper legal jargon, but wasn't a whole lot more detailed…

Mindblown. I went to law school and now work as a developer but never thought about it. Writing tests for laws should totally be a thing.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#83

Post by pxc »

melenaboija wrote: post #80
pxc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. 'à' has a grave accent, not an acute accent.

Yups right, sorry :(

I just figured that since you cared to name the specific accent character (most people probably wouldn't!), you'd care about the mixup too. :)

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#84

Post by Rochus »

mdaniel wrote: post #76
Rochus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless, but I'm always wary of "law is like computer code." "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." (Twain?) Hasn't Cyc impressively demonstrated just how incredibly difficult and costly it is to formalize even the most basic matters of daily life? There already was a discussion two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059899

> Hasn't Cyc impressively demonstrated just how incredibly difficult and costly it is to formalize even the most basic matters of daily life? I would offer that the "cost/benefit" analysis for such a formalism exists on at least two axes: the concept domain which one is attempting to formalize, and the benefit (and/or size of consumers) of any such working system I can wholly understand that trying to translate the e…

> why not at least start with the tax code

There have been many such attempts (e.g. NKRL by Zarri et al., also funded by EU). There are even societies that have been dealing with such issues for many decades (e.g. http://www.iaail.org). The formalization of law and language is only one of the issues. Like many previous attempts, this one suffers from the fuzziness of human language (even in the case of tax code). Fuzziness is not a drawback; it is what makes it possible to communicate efficiently in the first place. In order for us to communicate effectively, we need an enormous amount of tacit knowledge about our environment that our culture and life experience brings. If one tries to formalize the language, as in the present approach, one must also take this knowledge into account, down to the last detail (an "upper ontology" is by far not sufficient for this, and Cyc after decades is still not finished). And the tacit knowledge and also the moral valuation of the same change over time. And there are things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox which stand in the way of a complete formalization. Lenat's 1990 book addressed many of the issues, but also his more recent talks are very informative where he demonstrates how they had to extend the Cyc representation language to cope with the problem, and why e.g. RDF triples are not enough.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#85

Post by cpeterso »

Interesting that their “money” type doesn’t allow fractional cents or track the currency. And the only collection type is a fixed-sized list. I can imagine a lot of other useful base types that would be useful for laws about the real world, such as physical units like meters.

https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/tutorial#The%20Catala%20...

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#86

Post by btilly »

EPWN3D wrote: post #17

I don't think there's much of a problem with actually reasoning about a law's text that a computer can help solve. The complicated bit is weighing equities, which still requires humans and lawyers.

I think you meant, "...humans, lawyers, and bribes."

No, I don't have a lot of faith in our legal system. Why do you ask?

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#88

Post by irundebian »

phillipcarter wrote: post #74
kstrauser wrote: post #30

I think what I'd rather see is a standardize test suite format for laws that spells out the intentions. Once I lived in a state that proposed a very simple anti-child porn law with good intent, but it was too simple. It read sort of like "anyone sending explicit pictures of minors from a cell phone will be guilty of conveying child porn". It was written in the proper legal jargon, but wasn't a whole lot more detailed…

I think for something like this to be effective, you need the actual intent encoded correctly (so this use case wouldn’t have been solved), and lawmakers acting in good faith (i.e., not drafting legislation that’s intentionally vague such that it can cast a wide net and force people to use the courts to dispute things).

Intent could be derived by parliament debates minutes.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#89

Post by ambyra »

jrm4 wrote: post #43
kstrauser wrote: post #30

I think what I'd rather see is a standardize test suite format for laws that spells out the intentions. Once I lived in a state that proposed a very simple anti-child porn law with good intent, but it was too simple. It read sort of like "anyone sending explicit pictures of minors from a cell phone will be guilty of conveying child porn". It was written in the proper legal jargon, but wasn't a whole lot more detailed…

I partly like this idea in theory, but believe it is literally 100% impossible to come up with a better "test suite" than "the actual court system?"

Yeah, there’s no way that a modern computer could outdo the logical accuracy and processing power of our 300 year old legal system. Court rooms and arguing and paperwork, much more efficient than silicon.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#90

Post by kachnuv_ocasek »

drdeca wrote: post #54
blagund wrote: post #21

My hunch is, in any sufficiently large rule set, there will be inconsistencies. Handwaily think Gödel, or just the need for bounded domains in DDD. Humans (or, well, AI) is needed to cope with inconsistencies. That said, pointing out the fact of existence of inconsistencies could be very valuable. But a system needs to embrace them, not fight them.

Gödel’s theorems don’t imply inconsistency for all large systems (unless “large” is taken to mean something strange), just for systems which are both not super-weak in what they can say, and complete (or if they have their own consistency as a theorem). I don’t think Gödel’s theorems particularly support the claim you’re making. In fact, here is an argument that a consistent rule-set (either can be extended to someth…

I think parent might have been referring to the inconsistency that Gödel noticed in the US Constitution when applying for citizenship.
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