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APIs as language extension | 394 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

APIs as language extension

Authored by: hardmath on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 09:58 PM EDT

The argument is that a programming language cannot be
copyrighted because it cannot be reduced to fixed form of
expression. No matter how difficult the undertaking or how
creative the design, works that are not reduced to fixed
form are ineligible for copyright protection. Black letter
law, that.

The APIs are in principle like this, but more confusion
surrounds them because of the unfamiliarity of lay persons
with documentation vs. specification vs. implementation.
The issue benefits from connecting APIs for Java with the
observation that these are how the language evolves.

Dan Bornstein laid out the high ground for us today. APIs
cannot be copyrighted because they don't exist. The
signatures of methods? Those aren't the APIs (according to
Dan), they're merely part of the implementation.

---
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem
prover." -- Richard O'Keefe

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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