The law has no trouble at all making fuzzy distinctions. They are attempting to keep the peace, not make orthogonal cuts into reality.
We programmers need absolute clarity because our systems are executed by machines with no insight. But in other fields where humans execute rules, everyone else just shrugs and deals with little inconsistencies, or make meta-rules about judging "intent", that sort of thing.
> The law has no trouble at all making fuzzy distinctions.
Actually, in most of Europe it does.
While the US, UK and Ireland's legal system is based on "Common Law", most of Europe uses "Civil Law", where the primary source of law is the law code, which is a systematic collection of interrelated articles that explain the principles of law, rights and entitlements, and how basic legal mechanisms work.
Of course there's still a lot of room for interpretation and pragmatics, but the point is that right from the start, you try to get your definitions down as clear as possible.
It's quite interesting to see how the fundamentals of our legal systems actually differ. I decided to look this up for the first time because at some point I read some thread where some US people were actively discussing interpretation of your Constitution or the Bill of Rights, as to whether something fairly trivial to define could be ruled or not--might even have had to do with the right to bear arms, but the specifics aren't important. I was just amazed that this centuries-old document was seriously being "consulted" as if somewhere between the lines would appear some sort of hidden meaning--except it was pretty obvious that the final decision would rest with the interpretation and political ideas of whatever judge got to rule it. Which completely amazed me, it's one thing if somnewhere, in some obscure corner of fiscal tax laws some particular exception to a rule isn't defined unambiguously, but the big-to-medium picture of the law is not supposed to be up for interpretation!
Except in the US, or more precisely in Common Law legal systems, that's pretty much the idea.
I'm not saying it's bad BTW, it's just different. And I'm just commenting on how surprised I was that there's other ways (in democratic countries) than to strictly codify your laws.
We programmers need absolute clarity because our systems are executed by machines with no insight. But in other fields where humans execute rules, everyone else just shrugs and deals with little inconsistencies, or make meta-rules about judging "intent", that sort of thing.