Actually, I think it's a fair complaint. A problem with many laws is that they encode current cultural assumptions, which then become obsolete; this winds up with torturous arguments about the laws, decades or centuries later. If laws were easily refactored later, that wouldn't be a big problem; sadly, that's one of the ways in which law is a lot more of a PITA than programming. (At least, good programming.) Laws get changed only with considerable hassle and headache, if at all.
(Now there's an interesting long-term project: come up with a legal model that adapts the best practices learned in programming, while still being a viable legal model. Don't know if it's even remotely possible, but worth thinking about. A thread for another day, though.)
I can understand why they did it the way they did -- I'm enough of a linguist to know how utterly vague and hackable a term "grocery store" is. But they do seem to have avoided under-specifying by over-specifying instead...
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Re: Flaw in Question 1
Date: 2006-11-03 10:14 pm (UTC)(Now there's an interesting long-term project: come up with a legal model that adapts the best practices learned in programming, while still being a viable legal model. Don't know if it's even remotely possible, but worth thinking about. A thread for another day, though.)
I can understand why they did it the way they did -- I'm enough of a linguist to know how utterly vague and hackable a term "grocery store" is. But they do seem to have avoided under-specifying by over-specifying instead...