Don't lawyers do this to real-life contracts?
To answer it, no, not like this. Contract law has a lot of humans in it. You are certainly able to sign some contracts with combinations of clauses that can get you, and I've read horror stories at the mega-corp levels about contract clauses interacting unexpectedly and screwing some party or other. But even in those cases, the way they got screwed was by a collection of individually-sensible clauses.
A computer running a contract is by contrast blitheringly stupid. If you write a logic error into your contract that lets a participant suddenly claim all the contracted value by simply, say, sending a bid of 0 as many times as there are participants or something, there's nobody and nothing that will prevent that. If you try that in a human contract, it will be invalidated by some human judge.
Sure, lawyers may write complicated contracts in an attempt to screw the other signatory and they may play complicated games with the clauses, but running contracts as otherwise-unsupervised programs is a whole new level.
Furthermore, just having had a quick scan over the language documentation, it looks to me like a bog-standard imperative mutable language. One that is very young, and with few if any features designed for being used in a high-security environment. It appears to be based on raw event-based programming, a style of programming very easy to mess up and hard to declare and preserve invariants in. It looks like a very dangerous programming language to be trying to write financial contracts in. At least it's not dynamically typed, does seem to avoid excessive coercion, and should be memory safe; it could certainly be worse. But it could be better, too.
At the same, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrivener#Doctrine_of_.22scriv... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person .
Combining the two and suggesting that the result will somehow magically be more secure and less hackable - in any sense - is nonsense.
Citing the “rules of punctuation,” Canada’s telecommunications regulator recently ruled that the comma allowed Bell Aliant to end its five-year agreement with Rogers at any time with notice."
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25c...
The regulator concluded that the second comma meant that the part of the sentence describing the one-year notice for cancellation applied to both the five-year term as well as its renewal. Therefore, the regulator found, the phone company could escape the contract after as little as one year. "
I remember it was some combination of contractual obligations to supply a certain product at a certain price, obligations to supply a certain number of them, a clause that changed the price if a certain number of them were bought, that sort of thing. You can do things like create contracts where you can buy enough of the items to trigger the lower price then force the company to take back the ones you paid the higher price for, or if you can screw with the price of some component that is necessary for the production of the thing make it so it costs the producer more to make than you're going to pay, stuff like that. Legal shenanigans? Absolutely. But considered to be normal stuff at the higher levels of the game.
Hopefully someone can come up with some better examples. But I'll at least make a peace offering with this: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery
Does the company in question lose business when this comes out?