I was just thinking today about an idea to introduce some programming constructs to legal documents like contracts and organization policies/procedures. The spe

I was just thinking today about an idea to introduce some programming constructs to legal documents like contracts and organization policies/procedures. The specific situational semantics inside the documents would still be natural language and meant for human decision makers to implement, but the control flow aspects would be rigidly formalized well enough that documents conforming to this standard could be automatically turned into flow charts. More generally, it would ensure the documents conforming to the standard are able to be "read like a machine" to a certain degree (if not outright machine readable), which has implications for the ability of regulators and judges to "debug"/"trace" situations, or to pro-actively identify "edge cases", or to make tooling which assists with analyzing the documents and related paper trails, irrespective of the particular organization where the matter came from. So as a follow up to this research, I'm really interested to see, does the brain read legal/formal documents more similar to how it reads code, or more similar to how it reads natural language. Or is it somewhere in between? Does it change when we introduce some syntax constraints on the legal documents? How much rigid syntax does there need to be before the brain switches from one mode to the other?