In article <3ou0af$85p@offas_dike.sbil.co.uk> shepherd@debussy.sbi.com
(Marc Shepherd) writes:

|> >In <3ornv6$63a@punchdown.zocalo.com> kal@chromatic.com writes:
|> >
|> >Regarding Plaugher book's copyright to portions of the C++ standard:
|> >
|> >>          I don't know about the software (maybe it's been updated)
|> >>          but the book is obsolete. It doesn't have STL, Locales,
|> >>          auto_ptr etc. Iostreams have been templatized and a lot
|> >>          different from what is in the book. Exception hierarchy
|> >>          is different and basic_string is now STL compliant. I
|> >>          can't think of anything in the book that exactly conforms
|> >>          to the standard. The book seems to me to have been "hastily
|> >>          written" and has some trivial and avoidable errors. You
|> >>          can refer to a very good review (in the editorial in C++
|> >>          Report) by Stan Lippmann (no longer an AT&T employee :-)).


|> I'm still mystified by how Plauger's book became a "base document" for
|> the draft standard.  Mind you, I don't begrudge his first-amendment right
|> to publish a book that's obsolete before it even hits the bookstores.
|> (And, by the way, the book is an excellent tutorial on how to design
|> portable libraries, even if the libraries he's describing have virtually
|> nothing to do with the proposed standard.)  But how did he--merely one
|> of dozens of people who contributed to the working paper--manage to coerce
|> the committee to list him, and no one else, as the original author of
|> the library material?  Rather a backhanded slap at people like Alex
|> Stepanov, I would say.

No coercion involved.  At one point, the text from Plauger looked
better than what we currently had, so it was adapted.  That's all.

I don't think that there is any intent to lessen the value of
Stepanov's contribution, or of any other contribution.  But if you
look at the text in the draft, and you look at Stepanov's articles,
you will see that his *text* was not used.

I don't have my copy of the public draft at this site to view, so I
cannot verify the exact wording, but I imagine that it refers to
creating of the actual text, and not the ideas.  In this case,
Plauger's contribution definitly *does* deserve mention.
--
James Kanze         Tel.: (+33) 88 14 49 00        email: kanze@gabi-soft.fr
GABI Software, Sarl., 8 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
Conseils en informatique industrielle --
                              -- Beratung in industrieller Datenverarbeitung

>In <3ornv6$63a@punchdown.zocalo.com> kal@chromatic.com writes:
>
>Regarding Plaugher book's copyright to portions of the C++ standard:
>
>>          I don't know about the software (maybe it's been updated)
>>          but the book is obsolete. It doesn't have STL, Locales,
>>          auto_ptr etc. Iostreams have been templatized and a lot
>>          different from what is in the book. Exception hierarchy
>>          is different and basic_string is now STL compliant. I
>>          can't think of anything in the book that exactly conforms
>>          to the standard. The book seems to me to have been "hastily
>>          written" and has some trivial and avoidable errors. You
>>          can refer to a very good review (in the editorial in C++
>>          Report) by Stan Lippmann (no longer an AT&T employee :-)).


I'm still mystified by how Plauger's book became a "base document" for
the draft standard.  Mind you, I don't begrudge his first-amendment right
to publish a book that's obsolete before it even hits the bookstores.
(And, by the way, the book is an excellent tutorial on how to design
portable libraries, even if the libraries he's describing have virtually
nothing to do with the proposed standard.)  But how did he--merely one
of dozens of people who contributed to the working paper--manage to coerce
the committee to list him, and no one else, as the original author of
the library material?  Rather a backhanded slap at people like Alex
Stepanov, I would say.

---
Marc Shepherd
Salomon Brothers Inc
shepherd@schubert.sbi.com The opinions I express are no one's but mine!