meaning of legal
1. Created by, permitted by, in conformity with, or relating to, law; as, a legal obligation; a legal standard or test; a legal procedure; a legal claim; a legal trade; anything is legal which the laws do not forbid.
2. According to the law of works, as distinguished from free grace; or resting on works for salvation.
3. According to the old or Mosaic dispensation; in accordance with the law of Moses.
4. Governed by the rules of law as distinguished from the rules of equity; as, legal estate; legal assets.
5. legal Loosely used to mean "in accordance with all the relevant rules", especially in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C. " "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed. " Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of "natural laws" to achieve a desired objective. Their use of "legal" is flavoured as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers. Compare language lawyer, legalese. [Jargon File] legalese Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language indeed, they rather enjoy both, they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick. LEGOL "Application of MP/3 to the Design and Implementation of LEGOL, A Legally Oriented Language", S. H. Mandil et al, Intl Symp Programming, Paris 1974. Le-Lisp Jerome Chailloux and Emmanuel St James, INRIA, France. A LISP dialect close to Common Lisp, lexically scoped, with a CLOS-like object system. Uses both packages and modules. "le-lisp: A Portable and Efficient Lisp System", J. Chailloux et al, Proc 1984 ACM Symp on Lisp and Functional Programming, ACM. Version v. 16, available from ILOG, France. lemma
6. allowed by official rules; "a legal pass
">receiver"
Related Words
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