171–180 of 301 posts
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goofy; the language you're talking about is Catalan of Catalonia, not `catala`. > Just googling things about it is going to be hard when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"? edit: fine, it's called catalá in catalonian itself - this is so pedantic now that i might as well at this point say that the missing diacritic is sufficient to disambiguate.
it's catalá in catalá
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> A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form. Not necessarily. Notation can only do so much to help with understanding. To understand 4+4=8 you still need to understand what's a number, what addition means, and what it means for two numbers to be equal. The same problem applies to the law, and it takes far more time to understand legal concepts th…
> Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane discipline that you need to learn a new language for. It would seem to me that reading laws has become an arcane discipline, partly due to it being expressed in a language with overly long sentences, which handles branches and references very poorly from a readability perspective. > Imagine news anchors explaining that Biden agreed to add the lambda sign, but…
And if the actual text of the law consisted of coding symbols, I very much expect that (a) you'd have endless debates about the precise symbols being used, and (b) have to have anchors going over the meaning of those symbols and losing 9/10ths of their audience along the way.
But this fails to realize that _ambiguity (in some ways) is a fundamental important part of law_.
This is because the world itself is fundamental ambiguous (in some ways)/clear cut.
Naturally not all ways of ambiguity are wanted.
But you can be sure that with "code as law" the ways loopholes are abused will get worse in my opinion.
I would even go as far that some many laws should be more focused on what should be upheld then the details how (which is fundamental less clear cut/more ambiguous).
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I don't agree that the law is a huge mess. It is certainly far less of a mess than any code base I've ever seen, given the gigantic scope of what it applies to, and how many people if affects. Note that the legal system is indeed a huge mess, but that happens because of many other reasons - not a problem with the wording or vagueness of the law, but with the explicit (malicious) intentions of law-makers, judges, poli…
> How many people have been improperly punsihed/set free because of a poor interpretation of the word "child" in a specific law? How many improperly punished people is good enough? How many cases go to Supreme Court because the amount of needless ambiguity just adds up, one word at a time? > This is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable space to define what such a common word means. Right? Why do many l…
And no, cases don't often make it to the Supreme Court because the wording of the law is ambiguous. They make it to the SC because the parties disagree on legal principles and on whether laws are unconstituional or not.
> Right? Why do many laws redefine it?
I would have to see some specific examples to judge for myself. Still, this seems to be the opposite problem compared to what was raised earlier. So which is it? Do we want laws to be more explicit about their exact definitions of words, or more implicit?
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…
Laws don't need to be computer-executable, they're about intent and the interpretation thereof, so the test suite itself is really part of the law and may as well just be embedded in it.
For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I belie…
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…
I had so much trouble getting catala to even compile that I got frustrated. It’s a piece of academic code that’s very much abandoned