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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Public Domain Yacc (Important)
Message-ID: <5595@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 5-Feb-87 17:24:47 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.5595
Posted: Thu Feb  5 17:24:47 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Feb-87 18:31:52 EST
References: <142@ems.UUCP> <1170@husc6.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Distribution: world
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 17

In article <1170@husc6.UUCP> ddl@husc6.UUCP (Dan Lanciani) writes:
>...  It was my impression that there was a public domain
>yacc which was derived from the same source as the AT&T yacc--but not
>FROM the AT&T yacc...

Although there may well be a public domain reimplementation of
YACC, it cannot be derived from a "common ancestor" since YACC
originated in (AT&T) Bell Laboratories.  Due to various things
AT&T has said in the past, the YACC parser and the (minimal)
yacc run-time library embedded in one's application do not
require any licensing fee when the application binary is given
to others.  I don't think this extends to the source form of
the parser, but there is a chance that it might.

It is EXTREMELY unlikely that anyone reimplementing YACC from
publicly-available unrestricted information would come up with
source code that looked very much like AT&T's.