Bruce Perens wrote:
The structure of laws, courts, and contracts is indeed a machine that executes statements of rules. That it does so /fuzzily/ and through human rather than machine elements is not necessarily a /flaw /of the system, in that it is invariably asked to handle unforseen problems, and extends itself by doing so.
Where I would see a particular advantage in a machine processable language, would in handling ANDs, ORs and the scope of particular conditions. There was a recent example of UK secondary legislation that made an AND/OR/negation type of mistake, in the wording of a statutory notice that was supposed to summarise primary legislation. As a result, it appeared to imply that certain sorts of debts to a landlord could never be recovered.
A machine-executed language for legal rule sets is a frequently expressed, unachieved dream. But any program in such a language would necessarily be closed in its capabilities, and would need to fall back on humans for those unforseen problems. So, you wouldn't lose the courts or the arguing over what something "really means".
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