3 ms·

I wonder what the cyclomatic complexity is of the set of federal laws.

• lr4444lr 4y ago
  How about just looking at tax law to really juice that average...
  • nullc 4y ago
    My favorite bit of 'tax law': Decades ago I accidentally failed to file a return and ended up needing to compute some interest and penalties when I figured it out a year later. When trying to determine how the computation was done exactly, I found a court case where the IRS petitioned the court to let them approximate the results of this specific computation because applying the rule exactly was too complicated for them! [I did eventually figure it out.]
• mindslight 4y ago
  From the perspective of politicians, bugs in the legal code are actually features. The incumbent power structure expends resources paying lawyers to find and exploit them, while the little people are mostly stuck following the law at face value. Most people don't even get to run the interpreter, but get forced into plea bargains and settlements instead! The imbalance helps perpetuate the status quo which lines the politicians' pockets. Whereas bugs in computer software are problematic because they allow a new type of analyst to gain an outsized advantage, which upsets the status quo. Although the sharp contrast is slowly vanishing as full compromise bugs get rarer and the incumbent power structure employs more and more computer code analysts. For example, look at all of the security vulns in modern browsers and web protocols themselves that leak information to surveillance companies, but get downplayed as mere "privacy" problems that would be nice to fix some day perhaps.