CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

Post by gilcot » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 9:57 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #127

slazaro wrote: post #116

I know that naming is hard, and it has already been mentioned in the comments here but... I can't believe that somebody named a programming language with the exact same name as an existing natural language spoken by millions of people. It just seems like a bizarre decision that can't be a benefit at all and can only have negative consequences. Just googling things about it is going to be hard. Why immediately create…

This hasn't seemed to help or hurt the popularity of other languages. You've got hot beverages, single letters, snakes, gemstones, two letter verbs, oxidized steel, languages where two thirds of the name are symbols, etc. It doesn't seem to matter. It appears that society, and search engines, are well-equipped to deal with the concept of homonyms.

Post by gilcot » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 10:17 PM UTC

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #63

version_five wrote: post #11

What problem does this solve? It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor... but then like the example given uses "fair market value" as a term which I'd expect to be the kind of thing that's in contention, rather than any of the actual "logic", and it doesn't help with that. The reason we have courts and lawyers is because of the need for interpretation bey…

Catala still produces plaintext legal documents at the end of the day but can be seen as a markup language for those documents. But because that markup language is a whole lot more precise than the legal text itself, it can be a bit more versatile. Examples of how this could be useful: - Reducing the overhead for maintaining a list of semantic translations of that legal code into other languages. Of course the offici…

Post by brutusborn » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #289

unethical_ban wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed limits is one example.

in many countries speed limits are quite clear cut through "clear cut" here sometimes still involve an assessment of danger which fundamentally isn't 100% objective and e.g. in germany you are only allowed to "drive as fast as it's save" even if the speed limit is higher (and that is a common occurrence, e.g. resident areas tend to be 30km/h zones but you have to slow down at nearly every crossing because anything el…

Post by LudwigNagasena » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:51 AM UTC

victorbjorklund wrote: post #260

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words almost always mean almost exactly what they mean in plain English. That’s why the law is a huge mess. As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.

It isnt a bug it is a feature. There is a point in law sometimes being a bit vague to create flexibility

Post by gilcot » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

gilcot wrote: post #294

MichaelDickens wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL but from my experience reading laws, they're written in a way that looks like it's trying to replicate programming-language-esque nested logic, but in prose format—instead of using physical layout to establish the relationships between concepts, they use words, which I find more confusing. I would rather read laws written in a more structured format.

But all structured format use words, and they're many programming language that are prose since COBOL. No one want to write laws in APL or assembly like.