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> Yeah, laws and contracts are basically pseudocode; Are they? Do you say this as someone who is familiar with actual laws? Genuinely asking. Because I know th
by bonoboTP 6y ago
> Yeah, laws and contracts are basically pseudocode;
Are they? Do you say this as someone who is familiar with actual laws? Genuinely asking. Because I know that engineers (my past self included) like to imagine formalizing laws and turning them into code, which is extremely naive, once you see actual laws and how much human common sense judgment is needed to decide on them, including inferring intent, judging potential consequences, interpreting imprecise terms, etc.
Perhaps a part of the tax code is like code. But a lot of laws are far from it. It's more formal than novels but it's firmly natural language that you need to understand as a human.
- klyrs 6y ago"Basically" was sharing some heavy lifting with "psuedo" on that sentence. Tell ya what, I've got gobs of experience with pseudocode, and much of it requires tons of common sense judgement, inferring intent, judging runtime and memory management consequences, interpreting imprecise terms, etc.
- bonoboTP 6y agoAgreed. Vague pseudocode and fairly narrowly focused laws are quite similar in nature. I'd also compare these two to mathematical proofs written in natural language in textbooks or academic papers. They have recurring structures and patterns, but are not formalized proofs, leave things explicitly or implicitly as an exercise to the reader or assume cases as trivial. (The gap to a formal representation is often nontrivial effort and has never been totally done for most of math) But then again, we have lots of similar things. Household equipment user manuals, revenue reports, soccer match descriptions in newspapers, stock market updates, phone calls to make an appointment at the dentist, etc. Lots of things on various points of the structured/formal/closed -- unstructured/informal/open spectrum.