News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specifica... by gorenb on Sunday September 17, 2023 @06:21PM (#37549883)
As someone who has tried to read the Black’s law dictionary once, I must tell you that the law does use a lot of formal language.
Re:CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specifica... by tsimionescu on Sunday September 17, 2023 @06:43PM (#37550054)
It does, to some extent, but it's still much closer to natural language than code. Expressing the law in code would turn this dial up to 11 and then some.
Re:CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specifica... by kmoser on Sunday September 17, 2023 @11:28PM (#37551895)
Sure, but there would be all manner of services that could automatically translate law-in-code to any human language you wanted. The best part is that you could easily and automatically translate a law into, say, English, Japanese, and German. Whenever the law-in-code source changes, just rerun your translator and voila: no human intervention required (meaning faster and more accurate translations of the law into human-readable language).

You could even program the "law-in-code-to-humanspeak" translator to generate different levels of the target languages, e.g. translate into something at a 6th grade reading level vs. something at a grad school level. Again, the advantage would be the automaticity.

Re:CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specifica... by tsimionescu on Monday September 18, 2023 @04:18AM (#37553614)
But now instead of reading the laws that govern my life myself and understanding them, I have to rely on some third party to explain to me what laws my representatives are voting on.
Re:CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specifica... by kmoser on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @02:49PM (#37588319)
The government who writes the coded law could be required to provide freely available services that translates those laws into plain language.