At 09:18 PM 5/7/99 -0700, Jay D. Dyson wrote:
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>On Fri, 7 May 1999, Anonymous wrote:
>
>> Here's Lance Rose's take on the Bernstein decision:
>>
>> Sorry to say, but the 9th Circuit took the dumb approach I mentioned in my
>> earlier post.
>> Their whole approach to "source code as speech" is misguided -
>> unless we are talking about people talking to machines! Source code is
>> specifically designed and constrained to make a computer operate in
>> exactly specified ways.
>
> With all due respect, this is absolute rubbish. That one does not
>comprehend a language does not invalidate that language's being protected
>speech. For example, I know American Sign Language and use it on a daily
>basis (and no, I'm not deaf...well...not yet). Am I to understand that
>Lance Rose considers my method of communication to not be protected by the
>First Amendment simply because he can't grok it?
>
> Methinks someone needs to think/rethink through their position.
This is not the best argument.
Source code is human speech, for human-to-human communication. It has a
side-effect of being compilable into machine code, but it is in a human
language and is intended for human communication.
Have you ever modified a program written by someone else? What's your first
step? You read the program, to find out what it does. You don't read the
massive paper document that describes what the program does and how ..
because there is no such document. You don't read the comments in the code
.. because there are lamentably few comments. Therefore, you read the
source code. My first system programming professor drove this point home
to us -- noting that even solitary projects require communication to some
"other" programmer: namely ourselves at a later date when we've forgotten
what was in our minds at the time we started writing the code.
QED
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|Carl M. Ellison [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~cme |
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+--Officer, officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a dirty song.-+
