@disable

[retard]

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:19:16 -0500, bearophile wrote:

> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>> At least we copy with attribution :o).
> 
> The good thing is that programming language designs are not yet
> copyrighted :-) So D can copy from many languages.

Language specification documents can be copyrighted even though ideas are 
free (unless patented in the USA - software patents aren't enforceable in 
Europe yet and we all probably know that e.g. China doesn't care about IP 
rights anyway).

If you implement old ideas invented by some computer scientist, it's 
polite to give attribution - preferably to the original inventor. Even 
the C++0x community should remember this, since most of their "new" ideas 
are stolen from old CS papers. For instance the Abrahams & Gurtovoy book 
doesn't attribute functional languages that much whilst most of their 
content is stolen from the functional language community. They just 
geniously ran sed 's/function/meta-function/g' over some old text, 
mentioned some random c++ gurus like Unruh and veldhuizen, and, lo and 
behold, hardcore new computer science was born.