[kroltan]

Which is why I compared to legalese rather than arbitrary natural-language.

My argument would be that legalese with its strict "May" "Should"s and all that could be sufficiently similar to a (verbose) programming language.

Anecdotally, I certainly have entered "debugging" mode when trying to check if a specific clause of a contract was applicable to my situation before, rather than trying to interpret it liberally.

Of course, anecdote, and only demonstrates that the (my) brain _can_ operate "programmingly" when reading legalese, not that it does so "naturally".