This isn’t surprising.

Imagine a programming language: let’s call it leagalese.  It’s strongly-typed.  Uniquely, comments are a meaningful type and frequently execute.  Instances of the comment type, for subtle reasons, can drastically change the meaning of seemingly unrelated code.

It’s intended to be platform-independent but there are so many interpreters of varying pedigree (arbiters, county judges, state judges, federal judges, appellate judges in all of the preceding political entities, legislatures in all of the preceding political entities, and so on) that coders of the language tend to attempt addressing all of them, especially for mission critical applications.

Thankfully, there is a large and growing library of code that can be taken off the shelf and used with the coder making any application changes required due to recent legislative or judical changes to the legalese spec.

Sadly, legalese is so arcane that its practitioners have yet to be able to provide any kind of decent UX (let alone a GUI).  This means that even the most trivial requirement change can require the developer to make code updates and perform expensive, very expensive, regression testing.

While I personally enjoy dabbling with apps in legalese, as well as reverse engineering others apps, I would never publish my code for others to use as IANAL.  It does make me think of C pointers as quaintly simple.

marco:

From the standard Blumberg lease agreement.