friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) (10/22/88)
[sorry, don't have a References: line] Recently there was some traffic about Whitesmith's C, and I made note of the incompatible C library: > I have never in the meantime seen such a blatant example of gratuitous > incompatibility. What is surprising is that this came from > the man who cowrite _Elements of Programming Style_, P.J. > Plauger. Sad. An update on this prompted by a couple of nice notes from the net.folks. Dr. Plauger had previously been at AT&T, and his new group at Whitesmith's was apparently concerned about trade secret violations if they built an identical package. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, where the world of software was not as well-defined as it is today (?). It seems to me that just changing the external details of all the library functions (printf -> putfmt) would not provide much protection of this -- haven't we all seen copied student programs with changed variable names -- but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know about this. Note: the library was really incompatible, but it was done for real concerns -- sorry if I have imputed bad things on Dr. Plauger's good name. Steve -- Steve Friedl V-Systems, Inc. +1 714 545 6442 3B2-kind-of-guy friedl@vsi.com {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl attmail!vsi!friedl ---------Nancy Reagan on the Three Stooges: "Just say Moe"---------