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Legalese is way too confusing to qualify as non-ambiguous. I doubt most lawyers really understand what they're saying.
by hasenj 16y ago
Legalese is way too confusing to qualify as non-ambiguous. I doubt most lawyers really understand what they're saying.
- hugh3 16y agoIt just looks confusing because you're not accustomed to reading it. The bizarre turns of phrase are just as transparent to lawyers as an if-then-else statement is to a programmer. As evidence, I provide the fact that court cases rarely come down to ambiguous phrasing in the legalese portions of the law.
- hasenj 16y agoProgrammers don't understand code all that much. They understand it at the moment they write it, and they can understand it when they focus on reading it, but other than that, they rely on the machine to execute it.
- AndyKelley 16y agoKind sir, have a look at http://www.python.org/ http://www.python.org/
- hasenj 16y agoI work in python all the time, kind dude. And, are you suggesting legalese to lawyers is like python to us? Even if it was: I can't execute a python module in my head! I can read it several times and I might have a guess at what it does, but I can never execute it as well as a machine does. Also, I would invariable end up with bugs that I can only fix by inspecting how the machine executes the code, for example by stepping it through a debugger, or running portions of it in an interactive interpreter (aka REPL).