Re: patenting colimits?

[Uwe.Wolter@ii.uib.no]

Quoting Steve Vickers <s.j.vickers@cs.bham.ac.uk>:

> Toby Bartels wrote:
>> ...
>> Certainly much of what is in the patent application is obvious,
>> but perhaps not all of it; were these diagrams of diagrams a new idea?,
>> or was applying them to computer system specifications a new idea?.
>> ...
>
> Dear Toby,
>
> The idea of treating specifications as colimits is a few decades old
> now. Burstall and Goguen used it in their categorical account of their
> specification language Clear, with a specification used to construct a
> new theory as colimit of others.

Yes, Steve! And they coined also the idea of so-called "based objects"
that allow to distinguish between parameter specifications and
imported specifications once you are going to develop a fully fledged
theory of parametrized specifications. Ingo Classen worked out this in
more detail in his PhD thesis around 1995 (?) at Technical University
Berlin.

Best regards

Uwe Wolter


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