Imagine the legislators running a distributed version-control system, exchanging diffs, pull requests, etc., with each contribution able to be logged and credit

Imagine the legislators running a distributed version-control system, exchanging diffs, pull requests, etc., with each contribution able to be logged and credited to an author. This whole thing is actually a merge of two branches in the health care bill source. Of course, our legislation is not run by intelligent people trying to get things done as efficiently as possible, so it's not done this way. In fact, if you can imagine the complete opposite of DVCS (or even regular monolithic VCS) that seems to be pretty close to what's going on. Difficult to know who authored exactly what. Nebulous states of various parts of bills at various points in time. Opaque language designed to shift potential blame in the future if something goes wrong. Vestigial formatting rules, incomprehensible phrasing (to those who would equate law with plain English) and a high level of redundancy. Question for lawyers: if law (as in legal writing) is written as a sort of code built up over time based on past rulings and with concrete (or semi-concrete) meanings in terms of what effects it's supposed to have, why do we not get any 'comments' in legislative law? For example, it makes sense for a contract between two corporations to not have 'comments' to go along with the 'legal writing code' -- you're using the contract against someone else, so it's their job to decipher what effects it will have (right?) But legislation isn't supposed to be used as a competitive chokepoint between two entities, it's supposed to be something that people who are affected by it (in the case of medical insurance reform, everybody) can understand. Reading legal writing to me seems like reading source code without comments, and you just don't give source code without comments to someone asking to read your code unless you have a grudge against them.