[plt-scheme] Fwd: [PRL] Programming Languages in the Code of Federal Regulations

Greetings.

On 2010 Apr 20, at 01:43, Matthias Felleisen wrote:

> Read and weep. I'll ask Simon what he thinks on Wednesday. 

I saw this mentioned elsewhere (I can't now find it, but the remarks had the same general air of horror).  One of the comments pointed to <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.htm>, about:

> Financial and insurance contracts do not sound like promising territory for functional programming and formal semantics, but in fact we have discovered that insights from programming languages bear directly on the complex subject of describing and valuing a large class of contracts.
> We introduce a combinator library that allows us to describe such contracts precisely, and a compositional denotational semantics that says what such contracts are worth. We sketch an implementation of our combinator library in Haskell. Interestingly, lazy evaluation plays a crucial role.

Not Scheme, but entertaining.  Of course, this may be the same 'Simon' you're referring to.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk