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Comment by hakan | Hacker News Reader

"... with Release 33-9117, the SEC is considering substitution of Python or another programming language for legal English as a basis for some of its regulations."

If this was actually implemented, it'd be incredible. No more ambiguity when you have to define all the parameters and outcomes explicitly!

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It'd be incredibly stupid. The language and some other programming languages don't even have proper standards written out or they change on the whims on their creators or community. Which version of Python will you use? 2.x or 3? Oh hey and will you use the map and filter functions or use generators instead or maybe you'll use a for-loop? What are the rules for that?

Don't kid yourself, there's still a lot of room for ambiguity.

You may be able to obfuscate the code, but so long as the investor can easily test your model with values of their choice, it doesn't matter if you use a map or a for-loop.

The regulation will be very state-dependent, though.

EDIT: oh, and that annoying halting problem...

Is a monkey-patching friendly language really the best thing for this? (Asks the Smalltalk guy, whose language is just as monkey-patching friendly and is used in a lot of Financial apps.)

Functional languages would be much better for this purpose.

Monkey patching (from what I've seen) is almost always the result of a poor programming, something which no language can be shielded from.

No, but in the right language, you can at least be shielded from the monkey-patching.

But you need trained programmers to use the right language.

Also, Python is clearly a step up from English on a variety of metrics, including the reduction of the ability to monkey-patch.

Functional languages can do even better, however.

Good languages actively fight off poor programming. Take ML or Haskell: if you didn't think about the problem well enough beforehand, it won't compile.

On a second thought they can use Python fine. Just issue something like the text at www.brool.com/?p=97 as the very first requirement.

Python has some FP features. More importantly, it's incredibly easy to learn, available on just about every platform (JVM users and .Net users can use it, Mac, Linux, Windows, etc).

agreed, plus by my understanding it is also already fairly popular in the financial programming community.

Python has some FP features. More importantly, it's incredibly easy to learn, available on just about every platform (JVM users and .Net users can use it, Mac, Linux, Windows, etc).

Yes, but having "some FP features" is a far cry from being able to use FP to do lots of reasoning about your program.

It's not intended to be a complex statistical model. It's intended to replace XML Files that may have included calculations, with a system that allows people to plug their assumptions into the program and get an answer, rather than parsing XML and turning that into a program.

My understanding is that the type of calculations they're talking about, if you need complex Functional Programming you're doing it wrong.

If they're smart then it would actually be a very restrictive subset of Python, not the full language.

No ambiguity?

Suppose the deal goes out there, bonds are sold, but then real world inputs result in an endless loop. What happens to the money then?

One can still collect the functions that loop into lambdas and start passing those around ?

Same thing could happen with human language legal copy.

Absolutely agreed. In fact all sorts of conflicts and ambiguities can easily get missed, as well as ambiguous terms such as the bond issuer at its discretion can rearrange payments. (Yes, this has happened. And money was diverted from top tranches to lower rated ones.) Furthermore the entire reverse engineering process is a lot of work for a very imperfect result.

So this is definitely a big improvement.

But my point remains that it is not perfect. There still are ambiguities.

Knowing governments' actions, this is going to be a proprietary mix made out of APL and PHP—the worst of both worlds.

Don't be bad-mouthing APHeLP -- we don't need to be getting into a language holy war here.

(Actually something as straightforward as a de-crufted PHP with APL's matrix handling would be a pretty wonderful language, when you think about it.)

Are you sure it's not apHELLp?

Rule 34: http://www.impredicative.com/ur/

I'm sure someone will apply Gödel's incompleteness theorem to the Python syntax, and complain that they want to do something that isn't expressible in python (or any other language you choose).

You know that Gödel's incompleteness theorem concerns itself with provability and not with expressiveness?

Sure, I just meant hakan's optimism about eliminating ambiguity is misplaced.

If this works well, this might cause more legal fields to work with computer languages, enable more legal automation , and could be really disruptive to the legal profession.

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