> So the question is, can you hide the formal stuff under the hood, just like you can hide a calculator tool for arithmetic? Use informal English on the surface, while some of it is interpreted as a formal expression, put to work, and then reflected back in English?

The problem with trying to make "English -> formal language -> (anything else)" work is that informality is, by definition, not a formal specification and therefore subject to ambiguity. The inverse is not nearly as difficult to support.

Much like how a property in an API initially defined as being optional cannot be made mandatory without potentially breaking clients, whereas making a mandatory property optional can be backward compatible. IOW, the cardinality of "0 .. 1" is a strict superset of "1".