On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> Generally programming languages themselves are always free, i.e. very
> few people have ever tried to copyright a language, and when they have,
> the courts have for the most part rejected such attempts (e.g. see [1]).
> It is of course possible to trademark the _name_ of a language, as for
> example Sun have trademarked the name "Java", and as was the case with
> "Miranda". It is also possible to patent techniques that might be
> required to implement a language. And finally you can of course copyright
> the language's reference manual. However, the law doesn't really provide
> any form of intellectual property that can cover the language itself.
> Copyright only protects expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
Could you elucidate on what constitutes the programming language? I'm
curious because I'd always understood that there was a patent on the
syntactic form
f x y = x + y , if x == y
= x - y , if g x
= x * y , otherwise
in functional programming languages held by the person which holds the
various licences for Miranda. (I've been told this by two people; however
I've never actually seen any published reference so I could be wrong.)
However there's not a problem with the isomorphic Haskell
construct
f x y | x==y = x + y
| g x = x - y
| otherwise = x * y
because it's the syntactic construct that's covered, not the idea of
`equations defined by clauses with side conditions'.
Does this mean that if I was (for some bizarre reason) so inclined and I
could produce a language, which didn't use any techniques which could be
disallowed due to `prior art', I could get `patent coverage' on the entire
language by dealing with the with implementation and syntactic appearance
separately?
(As Fergus said, although tedious an understanding of this area seems
useful to those working in any kind of computer science.)
___cheers,_dave______________________________________________________
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "All shall be well, and all shall be
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm well, and all manner of things
work tel: (0117) 954-5253 shall be well."
