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Catala
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Catala is a domain-specific language for deriving faithful-by-construction algorithms from legislative texts. To learn quickly about the language and its features, you can jump right to the official Catala tutorial. You can join the Catala community on Zulip!
Table of Contents
Concepts
Catala is a programming language adapted for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming. By annotating each line of the legislative text with its meaning in terms of code, one can derive an implementation of complex socio-fiscal mechanisms that enjoys a high level of assurance regarding the code-law faithfulness.
Concretely, you have to first gather all the laws, executive orders, previous cases, etc. that contain information about the socio-fiscal mechanism that you want to implement. Then, you can proceed to annotate the text article by article, in your favorite text editor :
Once your code is complete and tested, you can use the Catala compiler to produce a lawyer-readable PDF version of your implementation. The Catala language has been specially designed in collaboration with law professionals to ensure that the code can be reviewed and certified correct by the domain experts, which are in this case lawyers and not programmers.
The Catala language is special because its logical structure mimics the logical structure of the law. Indeed, the core concept of "definition-under-conditions" that builds on default logic has been formalized by Professor Sarah Lawsky in her article A Logic for Statutes. The Catala language is the only programming language to our knowledge that embeds default logic as a first-class feature, which is why it is the only language perfectly adapted to literate legislative programming.
Building and installation
Catala is available as an opam package! If opam is installed on your machine, simply execute:
opam install catala
To get the cutting-edge, latest version of Catala, you can also do
opam pin add catala --dev-repo
However, if you wish to get the latest developments of the compiler, you probably want to compile it from the sources of this repository or use nix. For that, see the dedicated readme.
Usage
Use catala --help to get more information about the command line
options available.
The top-level Makefile contains a lot of useful targets to run. To display
them, use
make help
Examples
To explore the different programs written in Catala, see the dedicated readme.
API
To know how to use the code generated by the Catala compiler in your favorite programming language, head to the readme of the French law library
Contributing
To know how you can contribute to the project, see the dedicated readme.
Test suite
To know how to run or improve the Catala reference test suite, see the dedicated readme.
Documentation
Formal semantics
To audit the formal proof of the partial certification of the Catala compiler, see the dedicated readme.
Compiler documentation
The compiler documentation is auto-generated from its source code using
dune and odoc. Use
make doc
to generate the documentation, then open the doc/odoc.html file in any browser.
The documentation is also accessible online.
License
The compiler and all the code contained in this repository is released under the Apache license (version 2) unless another license is explicited for a sub-directory.
Limitations and disclaimer
Catala is a research project from Inria, the French National Research Institute for Computer Science. The compiler is yet unstable and lacks some of its features.
Pierre Catala
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. The research group that he led in the late 1960s, the Centre d’études et de traitement de l’information juridique (CETIJ), has also influenced the creation by state conselor Lucien Mehl of the Centre de recherches et développement en informatique juridique (CENIJ), which eventually transformed into the entity managing the LegiFrance website, acting as the public service of legislative documentation.