Smart contracts are an abstract concept relating to the automated performance of an already agreed contract, whereas the Ricardian contract is a design pattern to capture the intent of the agreement of the parties, before its performance - wikipedia 
By means of a hashes within as references or links to external documents, above, the Ricardian Contract form easily extends to refer to code. The explicit referral to the code can pass legitimacy from over-arching legal prose to the code, thus implementing the concept of the smart contract.
Refactoring to describe blockchains and to integrate references to smart contract logic created a hybrid version of the Ricardian Contract. This form proposes a tuple of {prose, parameters, code} where the parameters can particularise or specialise the legal prose and the computer code in order to create a single deal out of a template or library of components. Also known as a Ricardian triple, it can describe blockchains, smart contracts, IoT devices and persons.
# See also
- The Ricardian Contract - iang.org
- Nick Szabo
* Implementations
* Intellectual Property