[ruby-talk:11507] Re: Esperanto (was: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?)

On Saturday 24 February 2001 14:10, DJC wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Feb 2001 15:30:45 +0900, "W. Kent Starr"
>
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >PS a recent version of Open Source magazine had some interesting reading
> > on code as literature. :-)
>
> Do you have a reference to this?

This was in the issue #19 of the Perl Journal in an article by Omri Schwartz 
who created a c2eng porcessor based on Parse::RecDescent as a sort of proof 
of concept to "help courts understand that to code is to talk and to talk is 
to code."

The article was followed by the controversial DeCSS code parsed into a more 
English-like form by c2eng.

This was interesting because legal types are still trying to addres the issue 
of whether source code is both copyrightable (generally, so far, they've said 
'yes') and protected speech under the First Amendment (generally, they don't 
know yet).

Schwartz's contention is that, if parsed into English (or some other 'natural 
language') it is protected speech.

Donald Knuth (if I remember correctly) has also remarked in the past on code 
being a form of expression, every bit as legitimate as "How are you, today".

From time to time on the XP lists, there is are debates on the value of 
documentation (per se) tending towards good coding practices make code easy 
to read and thus code becomes its own documentation. Intriguing concept. :-)

c Tux
c Tux run :-)

( But of course in Ruby it is:
Tux = Penguin.new
Tux.see
Tux.run )

Regards,

Kent Starr
[e-mail]