I'll blame this idea on Tim Daly, since he's been infecting me with the literate programming bug - I have a rather outlandish question for the GCL devs:
Is there any chance that the GCL source code could be combined with the last ANSI draft spec into literate documents? Obviously this wouldn't be either an official ANSI standard or even a draft but if it is permissible to include and work off of the draft of the spec, perhaps the spec, updates to the spec based on current standards, the code that implements any given part of the spec, and Paul's test that that part is functioning correctly could all be woven together into a coherent, self documenting whole. My other question - would this be a legal use of the ANSI draft documents? The best answer I have found to this question thus far seems to be this post: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/5828f58fa34e2ce8 which basically seems to say it's unclear. Would it be possible to contact the interested parties and try to formally get the draft spec under public domain? Obviously a major expensive effort wouldn't be workable but if the intent was already to release it as public domain perhaps finalizing that release could still be done. Cheers, CY P.S. - The above question actually raises another one - since in one sense it could be argued that any compliant ANSI Lisp distribution in effect is an instance of the spec, how can one be ANSI compliant and still open source, given the ANSI folks keep control over the spec documents and (AFAIK) prevent republishing them? Is it only human readable versions of the spec that have trouble? How "different" does some instance of the spec have to be to be in the clear? __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Gcl-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gcl-devel
