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A legal document is essentially a program; but: - They don't use variables where they should. - They don't factor out common code in libraries. - They don't use

A legal document is essentially a program; but: - They don't use variables where they should. - They don't factor out common code in libraries. - They don't use any reasonable kind of diff and patch. All this means they are doing extra work with bad tools not made for their needs. They might not see it, but that's lame.

mjwalshe 15y ago
erm no its a very speclised form of document - I wish programmers who have no experience of how laws are made and parliamentary procedure would stop making broad assumptions like this. Any thing using a parliamentry system to draft laws has a lot of fuzy areas and some non obvious gotchas. I while back i had a whole day being briefed on the new employment laws one of my collegues asked well why did they not draft the wording so its clear exactly when you are allowed to discriminate on age grounds. The General Counsel who was leading the course gave a wry grin and said well there are lots of lawyers in the House of commons so maybe they wanted to create loads of work for there lawyer friends
- icebraining 15y ago
  I don't know why have you brought up draft laws. Parents said "legal documents," of which only a minuscule number are laws. Most are contracts, licenses, agreements, deeds, etc.
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    Which have a law that underpins them - I was talking about the more general case/
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  I failed to parse your response, but it doesn't seem to address the points I made. Any program text itself is a "very specialised form of document".
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    no that's just the high level representation of the program I was commenting the tendency of non political tecies (who are not wonks) to make a very superficial link between using a SCS to commit code and how government and in how particular laws are made.
- tow21 15y ago
  Well, as a programmer * whose father is an academic lawyer * who has actually developed software for drafting and reviewing legal documents within parliamentary procedure I can tell you that all the above is entirely true. In any case, the vast majority of legal documents in everyday use aren't developed in a parliamentary system, they're developed within the framework of contract law, where sensible refactoring and variable naming would go a very long way if lawyers had the tooling and training to make use of them.
andreasvc 15y ago
No it's not; a program defines computations from certain inputs to outputs. A legal document, on the other hand, is a deontologigal set of rules saying you must X and cannot Y etc. While introducing variables and libraries could make documents shorter, they wouldn't be easier to read or write, because a single change could have massive effects in other places, which you wouldn't notice at first because there's no computer to test the "code" on. In the end legal text is just natural language, and it needs to be interpreted as such. And this is for the better, I for one wouldn't want a judge to just apply some formal procedure to decide guilt.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  "set of rules saying you must X and cannot Y etc" How it isn't a computation for certain inputs (X, Y...) to certain outputs (must, cannot, ...)? Legal text doesn't look like natural language and doesn't behave as one.
  - andreasvc 15y ago
    I believe it's not computation because the inputs are not well-defined, and the result depends on contexts which aren't well-defined either. What kind of definition of "look like" are you working with? I see words that are in the dictionary, plus I can parse them into meaningful sentences. I have no idea how "text" is supposed to behave anyway... It's about what humans do with it, and that happens to be the same as with other texts: humans read it and do stuff based on that. Sure there are differences, just as a letter of recommendation differs from a novel, but if you are claiming it's a different "language" you'll have to back that up.
    - guard-of-terra 15y ago
      Well, programs sometimes have to handle such problems too. You can always find keywords and function names from a program source in a dictionary, but it doesn't make program source a normal text. The main difference is that a legal document can be evaluated and it transforms input to output; novel doesn't.

mjwalshe 15y ago

erm no its a very speclised form of document - I wish programmers who have no experience of how laws are made and parliamentary procedure would stop making broad assumptions like this. Any thing using a parliamentry system to draft laws has a lot of fuzy areas and some non obvious gotchas. I while back i had a whole day being briefed on the new employment laws one of my collegues asked well why did they not draft the wording so its clear exactly when you are allowed to discriminate on age grounds. The General Counsel who was leading the course gave a wry grin and said well there are lots of lawyers in the House of commons so maybe they wanted to create loads of work for there lawyer friends

icebraining 15y ago
I don't know why have you brought up draft laws. Parents said "legal documents," of which only a minuscule number are laws. Most are contracts, licenses, agreements, deeds, etc.
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  Which have a law that underpins them - I was talking about the more general case/
guard-of-terra 15y ago
I failed to parse your response, but it doesn't seem to address the points I made. Any program text itself is a "very specialised form of document".
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  no that's just the high level representation of the program I was commenting the tendency of non political tecies (who are not wonks) to make a very superficial link between using a SCS to commit code and how government and in how particular laws are made.
tow21 15y ago
Well, as a programmer * whose father is an academic lawyer * who has actually developed software for drafting and reviewing legal documents within parliamentary procedure I can tell you that all the above is entirely true. In any case, the vast majority of legal documents in everyday use aren't developed in a parliamentary system, they're developed within the framework of contract law, where sensible refactoring and variable naming would go a very long way if lawyers had the tooling and training to make use of them.

andreasvc 15y ago

No it's not; a program defines computations from certain inputs to outputs. A legal document, on the other hand, is a deontologigal set of rules saying you must X and cannot Y etc. While introducing variables and libraries could make documents shorter, they wouldn't be easier to read or write, because a single change could have massive effects in other places, which you wouldn't notice at first because there's no computer to test the "code" on. In the end legal text is just natural language, and it needs to be interpreted as such. And this is for the better, I for one wouldn't want a judge to just apply some formal procedure to decide guilt.

guard-of-terra 15y ago
"set of rules saying you must X and cannot Y etc" How it isn't a computation for certain inputs (X, Y...) to certain outputs (must, cannot, ...)? Legal text doesn't look like natural language and doesn't behave as one.
- andreasvc 15y ago
  I believe it's not computation because the inputs are not well-defined, and the result depends on contexts which aren't well-defined either. What kind of definition of "look like" are you working with? I see words that are in the dictionary, plus I can parse them into meaningful sentences. I have no idea how "text" is supposed to behave anyway... It's about what humans do with it, and that happens to be the same as with other texts: humans read it and do stuff based on that. Sure there are differences, just as a letter of recommendation differs from a novel, but if you are claiming it's a different "language" you'll have to back that up.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    Well, programs sometimes have to handle such problems too. You can always find keywords and function names from a program source in a dictionary, but it doesn't make program source a normal text. The main difference is that a legal document can be evaluated and it transforms input to output; novel doesn't.