|
|
|
|
|
|
by kragen
1531 days ago
|
|
|
Open source code was a very new idea, perhaps going back no further than the first SHARE meeting 31 years earlier in 01955, but imposing legal restrictions on source code distribution was an even newer idea. (But what about open-source numerical methods? Well, EISPACK had been published in 01974, 12 years before NR came out.) Typing in code from a book was perfectly reasonable. The issue today, though, is not what restrictions the book's copyright holders imposed, or purported to impose, in 01986. The issue is the restrictions they impose today. |
|
|
People from the year 100000 might be offended by this notation. But in seriousness, what is the extra 0 for? Even without it, 1974 and 10000 are perfectly distinguishable, and for computers good methods to store long dates use binary storage formats, so amount of ASCII decimal digits doesn't matter there