I don't watch that kind of television much, but since I'm not a lawyer, my view of the world is probably too simplistic.
Still I'd argue that normal language is very poor at handling that tangle of references.
A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form.
When I've read (Danish) laws, I've often thought that they would read better as if statements.
It's not that I think those laws are written in legalese, it's that they are expressing logic in a suboptimal way. Like how "four plus four equals eight" is a suboptimal way to express what could be expressed with 4+4=8.
> A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form.
Not necessarily. Notation can only do so much to help with understanding. To understand 4+4=8 you still need to understand what's a number, what addition means, and what it means for two numbers to be equal. The same problem applies to the law, and it takes far more time to understand legal concepts than the actual wording.
Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane discipline that you need to learn a new language for. The law is decided on by, and applies to, people who are not and have no reason to become legal experts. It is simply a statement of the rules by which we try to live.
If laws were written in code, they would actually become much, much harder to understand than they already are for the vast majority of their audience. Imagine a public debate about a law where the text of the law was, instead of plain(ish) English, Haskell code. Imagine news anchors explaining that Biden agreed to add the lambda sign, but was heavily criticized by McConnell for his use of a monad instead of a plain for loop.
> Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane discipline that you need to learn a new language for.
It would seem to me that reading laws has become an arcane discipline, partly due to it being expressed in a language with overly long sentences, which handles branches and references very poorly from a readability perspective.
> Imagine news anchors explaining that Biden agreed to add the lambda sign, but was heavily criticized by McConnell for his use of a monad instead of a plain for loop.
While that would surely be interesting to watch, I think we both know that's not what would happen.
Like I wouldn't ask you "number four plus sign number four equal sign X?"
I assure you that no one who fails to parse long sentences would get a better understanding from replacing those with code of all things.
And if the actual text of the law consisted of coding symbols, I very much expect that (a) you'd have endless debates about the precise symbols being used, and (b) have to have anchors going over the meaning of those symbols and losing 9/10ths of their audience along the way.
If a word is used with a precise formal meaning, than it is a symbol more than a word. For example, "for" in C isn't the English word "for", it is a symbol for a precisely defined operation. Someone who speaks native English couldn't understand what `for (;;){}` means.
Still I'd argue that normal language is very poor at handling that tangle of references.
A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form.
When I've read (Danish) laws, I've often thought that they would read better as if statements.
It's not that I think those laws are written in legalese, it's that they are expressing logic in a suboptimal way. Like how "four plus four equals eight" is a suboptimal way to express what could be expressed with 4+4=8.