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CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

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Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#101

Post by retrac »

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…

> Of course the official language is the only one that is "legal"

If only! Here in Canada there are two official languages. All laws are drafted, and enacted, in both English and French. Both versions are equally valid, equally binding. And, sometimes, they don't say the same thing.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#104

Post by jeppester »

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 believe it would greatly improve everyone's ability to read laws and be confident about their understanding of them, which would be a huge boon for society.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#105

Post by mertd »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #82
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.

Also free agent simulations for discovering unintended consequences

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#106

Post by EdwardCoffin »

Something like this got passing mention in Greg Bear's [1] book Moving Mars (1993) [2], under the name Legal Logic. The (human) Martians used it with AI assistance to formulate legislation for their newly independent society.

For those who don't know, Greg Bear was a well-known SF author who died less than a year ago. His passing was discussed here at the time [3] [4].

He was one of the authors that influenced my youth a great deal, and I particularly remember this aspect of Moving Mars as catching my imagination, so will be interested to read what Catala has to offer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679668

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675708

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#107

Post by nologic01 »

This seems like a worthy project but I think its landing page should define the scope of what it aims to do in more concrete terms. Otherwise it runs the risk of being seen as overambitious and open ended without a concrete problem to solve.

E.g. its not clear if there is an explicit or implicit ontology against which the validity of any codification can be checked.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#108

Post by sesm »

This project is doing code -> text, right?

But then, the first line of description in Github says:

> Catala is a domain-specific language for deriving faithful-by-construction algorithms from legislative texts.

This reads like 'text -> code', which is the opposite of what this project seems to be doing.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#110

Post by altair8800 »

0x9b wrote: post #98
GolDDranks wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What do game designs have to do with law?

Games are activities bound by rules. Laws are rules for government/governed. AFAIK There's not really a programming language specific for describing how players interact in a game, so although there's no reason you couldn't implement it in any old programming language. I guess the same thing could be said of the law too until Catala.

Wouldn’t that just be writing test cases against the business logic of your game?
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