I am proud to announce a very early-stage release of Catala, the new domain-specific language for deriving
faithful-by-construction implementations from legislative texts https://gitlab.inria.fr/verifisc/catala  !

The language is not fully designed yet but will have a formal semantics. It builds on the insights of @Slawsk to allow one-to-one correspondence between a line of legislative text and an implementation unit.

The first application of Catala will be the implementation of the French family benefits ; I already spent quite some time on the legislative text to figure out all the nitpicks and I even found a very small bug in @OpenFisca : https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france/issues/1426.

It will be a few more months before the language is usable; we're planning to build an interpreter, compiler backends to other languages (JS, Python), as well as more formal features like a Z3 check of legislative coherence!

The language is named after Pierre Catala, a professor of law who pionneered the French legaltech by creating a computer database of law cases, Juris-Data. He also worked with Lucien Mehl, who created the ancestor of LegiFrance.

Thanks to all the people that gave me useful insights on the current state of law-related algorithms, which were essential for this to happen! @maukoquiroga @bzg2 @1h0ma5 @marobax

Due to limitations of the Inria Gitlab (prohibiting forks and PRs from non-Inria-owned accounts), the project has been move to GitHub : https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala