[TUHS] Lexical comparator, was Re: the battle against SCO

[wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 04:39:31PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> It does seem sensible to me for the Linux community to do its best to
> hunt down any infringing code... But that ought to be a matter of basic 
> ethics, having nothing to do with SCO.  I doubt it is likely to make 
> much difference to the court battle anyway... I think it's
> a good idea to remove any infringements that are there now, even if they
> are trivial ones; but let's not fool ourselves that it will pull SCO's
> fangs to do so.
 
For me it's not just a matter of defeating SCO, it's also one of sheer
indignation in the face of Saganesque FUD ("billions and billions of
lines of code"). I seriously want to know if there's even the tiniest
possibility that SCO is right, or if they're are just Smoking Crack Often.
 
While we're on the topic, I saw esr's code shredder/comparator that works
on lines of code. This isn't going to work if variables get renamed etc.
I'm writing a code comparator that works on a lexical basis, comparing
C tokens. It's only going to be proof of concept (i.e. slow), but I
should have it done by week's end and I'll pop a notice in here when it's
ready.
 
Cheers,
        Warren