[Submitted on 4 Mar 2021]
Abstract: Legislation at huge underpins original society, codifying and governing many aspects
of voters’ everyday lives. Oftentimes, law is area to interpretation, debate
and challenges at some stage in varied courts and jurisdictions. However in some varied
areas, law leaves dinky room for interpretation, and in actual fact objectives to
in moderation portray a computation, a name draw or, simply acknowledged, an
algorithm. Sadly, prose remains a woefully insufficient tool for the job.
The lack of formalism leaves room for ambiguities; the structure of upright
statutes, with many paragraphs and sub-sections unfold across more than one pages,
makes it onerous to compute the intended of the algorithm underlying a
given textual order; and, as with every varied part of poorly-specified serious tool,
the exercise of informal language leaves corner cases unaddressed. We introduce
Catala, a original programming language that we namely designed to allow a
easy and systematic translation of statutory law into an executable
implementation. Catala objectives to gather attorneys and programmers via a
shared medium, which together they’ll label, edit and evolve, bridging a
gap that in general results in dramatically wrong implementations of the law. We
have confidence applied a compiler for Catala, and have confidence confirmed the correctness of its
core compilation steps the exercise of the Fproof assistant. Now we have confidence in thoughts Catala on
several upright texts which would possibly perchance perchance be algorithms in disguise, notably fragment 121 of the
US federal earnings tax and the byzantine French household benefits; in doing so, we
expose a worm in the official implementation. We survey as a final consequence of
the formalization process that the exercise of Catala permits rich interactions between
attorneys and programmers, leading to a bigger belief of the authentic
legislative intent, while producing a correct-by-building executable
specification reusable by the bigger tool ecosystem.
Submission historical past
From: Denis Merigoux [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 4 Mar 2021 18: 03: 15 UTC (188 KB)
