Re:Ask HN: Why is law stuff seemingly against normal people?
by webmaven on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @10:56AM
(#13541650)
Not so. It is rather that they were chosen for readability in a completely different context.
It is as if, having progressed to the point of writing BASIC, future programmers were free to modify many things in subsequent languages to add or modify features, but rarely could anything be removed. For example they had to continue using the existing set of keywords.
So you have the mother of all overloading problems, for example GOTO doesn't just jump to a line number anymore but can also call a function eg. GOTO[foo(bar="baz")]. Worse yet, foo isn't necessarily a function name, but might be a variable (in one of several scopes) containing the function name. And so on.
The Law has been compared to spaghetti code. This is incorrect. It is a spaghetti language. The code is often very straightforward, given the syntax it has to be expressed in). For example the convention of declaring a variable upon first use of the value (and with a reverse infix notation at that) to achieve indirection (eg. "...bla bla city street state, hereafter referred to as THE COMPANY" or "...yadda yadda in Appendix II, hereafter referred to as THE AGREEMENTS") is weird, but does make legal documents much easier to understand when disambiguated (no arguing which "they" is being referred to). Never mind that we as programmers would generally prefer those vars and values declared at the begining of the document outside the body of the text that uses them, it does work.
It is as if, having progressed to the point of writing BASIC, future programmers were free to modify many things in subsequent languages to add or modify features, but rarely could anything be removed. For example they had to continue using the existing set of keywords.
So you have the mother of all overloading problems, for example GOTO doesn't just jump to a line number anymore but can also call a function eg. GOTO[foo(bar="baz")]. Worse yet, foo isn't necessarily a function name, but might be a variable (in one of several scopes) containing the function name. And so on.
The Law has been compared to spaghetti code. This is incorrect. It is a spaghetti language. The code is often very straightforward, given the syntax it has to be expressed in). For example the convention of declaring a variable upon first use of the value (and with a reverse infix notation at that) to achieve indirection (eg. "...bla bla city street state, hereafter referred to as THE COMPANY" or "...yadda yadda in Appendix II, hereafter referred to as THE AGREEMENTS") is weird, but does make legal documents much easier to understand when disambiguated (no arguing which "they" is being referred to). Never mind that we as programmers would generally prefer those vars and values declared at the begining of the document outside the body of the text that uses them, it does work.