> There really isn't. Food safety laws vary from state to state, and from country to country. The only real common ground is that refrigeration of food is required.
There isn't consensus in the language of the law, but there is consensus in the principles. Your example that refrigeration is required is an illustration of that point. Rather than focus on the details of the law, we can recognize that all food safety laws make some requirement related to the maintenance of temperature. Taken further, this is based on the principle that the available science is aware that food pathogens grow more rapidly at certain temperature ranges. There are many principles similar to this, upon which food safety laws are based, and these principles are the consensus.
The principle is what matters to this discussion, because that is what the laws will be based upon. I would expect that "software safety" laws will follow a similar tact. Even if I were to take the most cynical view possible, it doesn't seem plausible that legislators would attempt to write software safety laws for Java, C, C#.NET, Python, Ruby, Closure, etc, etc. Rather, they would attempt to establish principles, upon which process would be built.
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> There really isn't. Food safety laws vary from state to state, and from country to country. The only real common ground is that refrigeration of food is required.
There isn't consensus in the language of the law, but there is consensus in the principles. Your example that refrigeration is required is an illustration of that point. Rather than focus on the details of the law, we can recognize that all food safety laws make some requirement related to the maintenance of temperature. Taken further, this is based on the principle that the available science is aware that food pathogens grow more rapidly at certain temperature ranges. There are many principles similar to this, upon which food safety laws are based, and these principles are the consensus.
The principle is what matters to this discussion, because that is what the laws will be based upon. I would expect that "software safety" laws will follow a similar tact. Even if I were to take the most cynical view possible, it doesn't seem plausible that legislators would attempt to write software safety laws for Java, C, C#.NET, Python, Ruby, Closure, etc, etc. Rather, they would attempt to establish principles, upon which process would be built.