Re: GCC to open the C++ demangle API?

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot com>]

>     This is not a good situation.  The FSF took Berkeley's YACC and GPL'ed
>     it[*].

RMS writes:
> I think you are mistaken.  We have never done anything with BYACC as
> far as I know.
> 
>     [*] to the displeasure of Robert Corbett, the Byacc author.
> 
> I don't believe this either.  We used some of his code once,
> and he gave us his explicit cooperation with that.

I don't think "We used some of his code once" is an appropriate thing
to say, given that the Bison manual and AUTHORS file says

"Bison was written primarily by Robert Corbett"

and REFERENCES credits Corbett's 1985 PhD thesis for the encoding of
the parse tables.

The earliest reference I can find to bison is from 1986, see

http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/86-01-056

That article suggests that there was interaction in both directions:
RMS used Corbett's code and then Corbett used RMS's code.

Now, this was more than 15 years ago, so I'm sure that you simply forgot, but
you really should avoid this kind of phrasing.  After all, the only thing
that free software contributors (especially of the academic variety) ask
for in the end is proper credit, so credit should be generously given.

In any case, byacc came out after bison and was originally based on a
later version of Corbett's work, so David O'Brien's claims otherwise are
just wrong.  The FSF didn't "rip off byacc", even though it would have
been completely legal if they had.