G'day all.
On Saturday 18 November 2000 04:32 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > You're aquainted with how a linker works?
[...]
On Sat, Nov 18, 2000 at 10:49:11AM -0800, David Johnson wrote:
> For a few linkers, maybe. For others no.
[...]
If I may ask a meta-question here...
This question has come up before when talking about referencing
libraries from source code. Some languages do not textually include
any source code from the library when linking it in, using some kind
of automatically generated "interface file" instead. Some (e.g. C,
assuming the programmer plays by a standard coding convention)
textually include only that information which is necessary to access
resources in the library. Some (e.g. C++) may textually include actual
code.
Would a real court actually rule on this? It seems so... uhm... outside
the scope, if you know what I mean. It could mean that a given generic
licence (e.g. GPL) could be enforcable on one platform but not on another,
or in one language but not in another, depending on how the platform or
language developer chose to implement some standard feature, and while I
don't claim to know the minds of US judges, this does seem to be an area
that they'd rather not get into. I would think they'd rather rule on the
principle of linking, or the principle of library use, as opposed to
ruling on specific techniques to implement those features.
Or is this just wishful thinking? :-)
Cheers,
Andrew Bromage
