<story><title>Catala: A Programming Language for the Law</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03198</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Y_Y</author><text>Awesome to see someone trying to implement this idea, which I bet most people here have wished existed at some point.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    1 scope Section121SinglePerson:
    2   rule requirements_ownership_met under condition
    3   aggregate_periods_from_last_five_years of personal.property_ownership &amp;gt;=^ 730 day
    4   consequence fulfilled
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Syntax (shown above with line numbers added) looks pretty clean and simple. Hopefully it is enough like natural language that non-techies wouldn&amp;#x27;t run away at first sight&lt;p&gt;This probably won&amp;#x27;t cause a legal revolution tomorrow, but I hope it can be the start of a slow reform toward linguistic precision and machine-friendliness in legislation in the future.&lt;p&gt;Also it&amp;#x27;s a bad name, since that&amp;#x27;s already the (local) name of a widely spoken natural language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanhunter</author><text>This snippet begs all the important questions. How is the value of &amp;quot;aggregate_periods_from_last_five_years of personal.property_ownership&amp;quot; calculated? What does it mean to own a property? Does it count if you jointly own a property with someone else? If so, how much of a percentage of ownership counts as ownership? What about if for some part of the 730 days the ownership of the property was subject to dispute and it could have been owned or not owned by the person in question?&lt;p&gt;The whole thing smacks of false precision to me. It&amp;#x27;s precise about things that are not legally complex to be precise about in the current system, and the language gives the false impression that it&amp;#x27;s actually going to be possible to be precise about everything.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, it feels like it will have a similar drawback to sql[1] in that it seems on the surface to be non-technical, but actually requires significant technical expertise to avoid numerous beartraps and understand anything beyond the very most obvious.&lt;p&gt;[1] Which was originally intended to be a formal version of natural language understandable to non-technical people (hence the original name SEQUEL &amp;quot;Structured English Query Language&amp;quot;)</text></comment>
<story><title>Catala: A Programming Language for the Law</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03198</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Y_Y</author><text>Awesome to see someone trying to implement this idea, which I bet most people here have wished existed at some point.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    1 scope Section121SinglePerson:
    2   rule requirements_ownership_met under condition
    3   aggregate_periods_from_last_five_years of personal.property_ownership &amp;gt;=^ 730 day
    4   consequence fulfilled
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Syntax (shown above with line numbers added) looks pretty clean and simple. Hopefully it is enough like natural language that non-techies wouldn&amp;#x27;t run away at first sight&lt;p&gt;This probably won&amp;#x27;t cause a legal revolution tomorrow, but I hope it can be the start of a slow reform toward linguistic precision and machine-friendliness in legislation in the future.&lt;p&gt;Also it&amp;#x27;s a bad name, since that&amp;#x27;s already the (local) name of a widely spoken natural language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josalhor</author><text>&amp;gt; Also it&amp;#x27;s a bad name, since that&amp;#x27;s already the (local) name of a widely spoken natural language.&lt;p&gt;As a native Catalan myself I was quite surprised by the title.</text></comment>