Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Software Distribution
Message-ID: <363@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 8 Sep 88 01:11:30 GMT
References: <891@taux01.UUCP> <28200195@urbsdc> <5655@june.cs.washington.edu> <1076@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Distribution: na
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 16

In article <1076@cs.Buffalo.EDU> sher@wolf.UUCP (David Sher) writes:
>Out of curiosity since I've not seen this question asked, if the problem
>is that source code is too easy to play with, why not distribute encoded
>source.

If you have a product which you want to make available on several systems,
and the language you are using is the same on those systems, this is quite
an effective method.  We have an add-on product for our Prolog system which
is distributed as encrypted source.  This means that we have to maintain a
single kit of files, not a separate kit for each supported machine type.

There is, however, one reason why people might want to have a common
intermediate form, and that is that the customers for one's product might
not have the compiler you want.  If you have Fortran/Pascal/C/Modula/..
compilers sharing a common intermediate representation and back end, then
the customer only needs to have the back end to install a CIR distribution,
but with encrypted source he needs each compiler.