🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3vf1df$qdu@News1.mcs.net>,
Jim Fleming <jim.fleming@bytes.com> wrote:

> It is not clear if the class names are copyrighted...
> 	or the member function names...
> 	some have claimed only the implementation...

You can't copyright a name. You also can't (currently) copyright a
language standard in the sense that everybody who uses a conforming
implementation must pay you for the use of the standard's
specifications.

You can, however, copyright the standard *document*, meaning the actual
wording of the legal definitions making up the standard, since these
provide an `expression' of the `idea' of the standard (and you can only
copyright the expression, not the idea). This is what the standards
bodies do because they make a living, however frugal or luxurious,
selling such documents. You can also copyright the *code* which provides
an implementation of such a standard. This is what Plauger does in his
book, and this is what all the other people currently in the business of
providing (draft) standard C++ libraries do. Of course that does not
prevent you (or, for that matter, anybody else) from coming up with your
own implementation -- which, of course, you may not produce by wholesale
copying of, say, Plauger's version.

There is a good FAQ on copyright which is regularly posted to places
like news.answers.

> 		the book does not contain that level of detail...
> 	it is more like a series of manual pages...

This is quite untrue. I just had a look at the C++ book and it is very
much like Plauger's C book -- it has the verbatim text of the standard
*and* C++ code which supposedly implement it.
 
Anselm
-- 
Anselm Lingnau ......................... lingnau@tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
Si jeunesse savoit; si vieillesse pouvouit.                  --- Henri Estienne