🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <60116@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Golden Richard <grichard@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes:
>Another (perhaps secondary) reason that I see for the current "low reuse"
>syndrome is the number of extremely sloppy components that are available.
>...[an example of buying object code] ... A major problem with using someone
>else's code in object form is that, barring a rigorous specification, it's 
>virtually impossible to ascertain *exactly* what a component does.   Having
>source is helpful, but who wants to poke through hundreds (thousands?) of
>pages of code "verifying" functionality?

I've had similar experiences with C library functions packaged with a
compiler, with 3rd party code that uses 'slightly' variant library
functions, and some OOP systems where the interface is formally spelled
out but the rest kept elsewhere - in all three cases, I've either needed
to hunt down the real source or waste a great deal of time probing a
black box.

In this day and age, few programmers would even poke through the lines
they wrote themselves without a symbolic debugger and if source is included,
all it takes is a single re-compile to create the step-able version.

And speaking of reuse, and this problem of source-code secrets, how does
this sit with the misplaced metaphor of software-as-literature with respect
to copyrights? (If I quote Tolstoy's first edition, and the passage is
stated contrarily in the fifth, do I still owe royalties? :-).
-- 
     Gary Murphy - Cognos Incorporated - (613) 738-1338 x5537    
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  Cosmic Irreversibility: 1 pot T -> 1 pot P, 1 pot P /-> 1 pot T