An program written in an ill-defined language being run by a malicious interpreter with an agenda would be a really interesting project in seeing how far you could twist the meaning of the original program.
These laws don't cost very much because they get deprecated through less formal mechanisms (they are reinterpreted, or the bodies responsible for enforcing or adjudicating them decline to do so), which makes this a very inefficient use of a legislature's time.
Better yet, attach a sunset clause to every law, proportional to the number of votes it gets (and maybe unanimously passed = no sunset). Now they'll have to spend some of their time renewing old laws, and if anything is too toxic for the majority to vote for, it goes away.
It would be an interesting test of what is actually "must pass", though.
I also think it would encourage less partisan and more consensus-built legislation if the number of votes it passes with extends the amount of time before it sunsets, esp. if the relationship is not linear. Right now, if you have 50%+1 vote in the House, and 60 in the Senate, you don't have to care about the rest, so you can make legislation as extreme as you can while remaining within those boundaries. But if the difference in getting extra votes is a renewal vote in 25 years (with, say, 3/4 supermajority passing) versus just 5 years (50%+1), those extra votes may well be worth fighting for with some concessions.
ftfy. and I'd add that being from the US, I'd expect that sunset clauses on all laws would have the effect of giving the legislators something to do other than raise money for reelection.
1. You have hundreds of code reviewers, many of whom will have their own motivations
2. The code base is hundreds of years old, poorly maintained and often contradictory in its goals.
3. You have hundreds of millions users.