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by testcross 2074 days ago
The author explains what were the challenging bits in this thread (in french): https://twitter.com/DMerigoux/status/1314531302079688709
2 comments

It's rare that I (an American) get to help out others by translating something, so I will post my translation here.

"Four years after the first publication by DGFIP, I have the pleasure of announcing that the source code permitting the calculation of taxes on revenue is finally reusable (recompilable by others)!

To use this algorithm in your application, follow this link...

It took us 1.5 years (with my coauthor Raphael Monat) to identify that which was missing in the published code in order for it to be reusable, and to fix this situation.

More or less, thanks to our project Mlang, a person can simulate IR's calculations without needing to interface with DGFIP.

The difficulty came from a constraint from DGFIP, who did not want us to publish (for security reasons) a part of the code that corresponds to a mechanism that handles "multiple liquidations". Raphael and I recreated this unpublished part in a new DSL.

DGFIP equally didnt want to publish their internal test games (cases). We had proceeded therefore with the creation of a suite of random test cases, separate from the non published ones, to finally be able to reproduce the validation of Mlang outside of DGFIP."

Native French speaker here (Québécois). Minor nitpick: Your translation of "jeux de tests" to "test games" is incorrect.

The word "jeu" can indeed mean "game", but it can also mean a group of things. A better translation would be "test suites", "test sets" or similar.

Thank you for your help! I did it totally on the fly without a dictionary and I enjoyed learning this word from you :)
Bastille, tabernacle!
The last four posts in the Twitter thread:

"A little less than a year after the publication of [blog post], we have therefore found a compromise letting us to respect both the obligation to publish the source code and the security constraints of DGFiP.

In letting us publish the code on their site and accessing confidentially the source code they didn't want published, the DGFiP let us find alternative solutions that made the publication of the source code concrete and operational.

This compromise lets both parties come out on top, unlike what happened with the source code of CNAF [link] where the administration simply argued a too-important difficulty and indefinitely postponed [1] it.

Letting those who ask for the source code to see it after a NDA therefore appears to be a possible solution when the publication is delicate for technical reasons. Could this path be useful for the report of @ebothorel?"

[Note: translation here is somewhat more geared towards a natural English translation than a literal French translation.]

[1] "repouss[er] [...] aux calendes grecques" appears to be an idiom that's not in my dictionaries, but from context appears to mean "indefinitely postponed"

The calends [0] are the first day of every month in the Roman calendar. As the Ancient Greek calendar does not feature calends, postponing something to the Greek calends means postponing something to a later, unknown and unlikely to happen date.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calends

The calendes were a Roman holiday IIRC. Greek ones simply don’t exist...