I agree wholeheartedly, in the local scale person-to-person sense.

But your argument is knocking down a straw man, by coming at it from the other direction. I'm not advocating for being an asshole via finding loopholes, but against the ridiculousness of creating a second set of half-formal rules to repair deficiencies in the fully formal ones.

> Under the 'code is law' doctrine, just because you could do something, you can do something. This is incompatible with anything resembling civilized society.

Yet this is exactly how the legal system does work. If an action is "wrong" but not illegal you can't actually be sanctioned for it. See: pretty much any large company in the news over some kind of outrage that will ultimately go unpunished.

Law is subject to human interpretation, evaluation of intent, and error correction. Every case has a number of unknowns that judges and juries are supposed to clarify. This is a feature, not a bug.

Code does not. The source for any non-trivial program encodes an uncountable number of unknowns that frequently lead us to absurd conclusions, with no ability to sanity check or correct them.

Edit: I misread the comment I responded to, and as the poster rightly pointed out, my comment is just stating the obvious. Sorry about that.

    just because you could do something, you can do something. 

What we are missing is good forensics. A number of people in this thread have hinted at this.