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A comment on Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language. Parent comment

Re:Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty... by renewiltord on Sunday September 18, 2022 @06:33PM (#32892113)
The number one problem with this language is that everything is inlined because they don't have the concept of macros or variables. They have some variables but they are all ad-hoc designed into the language. For instance: ad-valorem means something but it's all from history. Adding a new term is a huge effort in this language.

Secondarily, they don't have a concept of macros except in a very ad-hoc sense. This means that they are afraid of macro use because they do not know the concepts of macro hygiene.

This is likely due to intentional creating a moat around the industry.

tl;dr Legalese is impenetrable because it uses the equivalent of Forth but POSIWID

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Re:Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty... by HPsquared on Sunday September 18, 2022 @06:39PM (#32892160)
I don't know about that, for example contracts usually define their terms as they go along. "Hereinafter referred to as...". That's basically a #define macro.
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Re:Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty... by renewiltord on Sunday September 18, 2022 @08:35PM (#32892905)
Isn't that more akin to a constant? Because #define macros are quite powerful, they can also express constants.
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Re:Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty... by ben_w on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @03:37PM (#32930414)
Not sure (not a lawyer), but at the very least the "Hereinafter referred to as…" statement can point to the entire agreement containing that statement: https://s3.studylib.net/store/data/008711807_1-e257ae31713cf...

The advantage of natural languages is self-referential infinite recursion is basically fine. The downside is, no compile-time checks for logical inconsistencies.

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Re:Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty... by renewiltord on Thursday September 22, 2022 @12:23AM (#32934774)
Right, in theory, but in practice they don't really use that functionality, right? I think the reason they don't is that they have macro hygiene issues with the language because while natural language has supreme flexibility, it does not have easy to use scoping constructs and so things inside the macro will leak to outside the macro.
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