Re: How to challenge a GCC patch?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr> wrote in message 
news:sj3rk5$na1$1@dont-email.me...
...
> -- This   specification  is  adapted   from  the  Ada   Semantic 
> Interface --
> -- Specification Standard (ISO/IEC 15291) for use with GNAT.  In 
> accordance --
> -- with the copyright of that document, you can freely copy and modify 
> this --
> -- specification, provided that if you redistribute a modified version, 
> any --
> -- changes that you have made are clearly 
>            --

Umm, someone is confusing the original ASIS drafts with the ISO Standard 
(which has an ISO copyright with no exceptions). I would definitely not 
reference the ISO Standard in anything you are freely giving away -- there 
are copyright trolls out there that could easily decide to get your material 
banned from the Internet.

For Ada, we are very carefully keeping the Ada Reference Manual as a 
separate document from the ISO Standard, so that the Ada RM has the 
permissive copyright while the ISO Standard for Ada definitely does not. 
These are not the same thing!

That care was not taken for the ASIS Standard; I know of no public version 
that was maintained. As such, my opinion is that ISO owns the copyright, and 
any extensive use (like using all of the specs) would require a license from 
ISO. This is by far the best reason for abandoning ASIS - I don't believe 
that you can implement it without getting a license from ISO (since the bulk 
of the ASIS Standard is Ada specifications, you are using too much to fall 
under fair use). This is one reason that I would never consider implementing 
ASIS in Janus/Ada.

>> Actually, it is. Apart from ISO verbiage, all the interesting parts of 
>> the ASIS standard is put as comments in the corresponding ASIS packages.
>>
>> Moreover, AdaCore kept this good habit for all the newly introduced 
>> features that support up to Ada 2012, which would make retrofitting them 
>> into an updated ASIS standard quite easy.

It's only easy if you think that giving AdaCore's work to ISO under the 
exclusive copyright that they (ISO) will insist on is something that is 
legally and ethically appropriate.

You need to come to grips with the reality that ASIS is dead. It's legally 
dangerous to implement it, it isn't a good match for either syntax or 
semantic analysis (doing neither very well), and it is poor match for modern 
compilers (hardly anyone builds trees much like the ASIS ones, unless you 
are trying to implement ASIS).

                                                       Randy.