On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 07:53:52AM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > > On Jul 21, 2004, at 09:26, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: > > >But the human who expresses a beautiful and elegant idea of loops > >*does* have a copyright on that, even if he writes it into a program > >to produce customized loops. > > Not likely. The type of loops generated by a compiler are not really > creative. They are, to start with, maybe 10 different sane ways of > doing a loop in assembly, if even that. Those different sane ways are > used by every assembly language programmer, every compiler writer, etc.
Ironically, gcc uses none of them. > The choice between those different sane ways is, in any sane compiler, > driven by one of two technical --- not creative --- requirements; > either speed or code size. "Insanity" was the primary driving factor for gcc, I think. Not copyrightable though. It's far too trivial. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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