I am fairly well convinced that a reasonable implementation of the Standard
Library might well reproduce the text of the Standard Library declarations
virtually verbatim as a means of presenting to the user a description of
the interface the implementation provides.

Since I own an electronic copy of the standard, I have been steadily
extracting the declarations from their contexts, and pasting them into text
files with include guards, and .hh extensions.  When I look something up,
and I haven't already extracted the section in question, I simply do it at
that point.  Eventually, I'll have all of the declarations in traditional
c++ header files.

Now my question is this: The ISO/IEC 14882:2003 is copyrighted.  If I do
simply use that text for some publicly available project, it seems it might
potentially lead to legal difficulties.  OTOH, failure to provide the
content specified in those header declarations implicitly, if not
explicitly, would be failing to correctly implement that Standard.

I'm not asking for legal advice in any kind of binding or professional
sense.  I suspect I will contact ISO before I do anything that might
actually result in a legal contest.  I do however see potential value in
using these headers, more or less, as-is, as a means of providing IDE
functionality, and/or on-line documentation.  I would like to have some
sense as to whether there is a positive future in designing with the
expectation that I could use the declarations as they appear in the
Standard.
--
STH
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