Re: Parallel program solving

["Mike Westerfield" <MikeW50@aol.com>]

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In article <4VFZ2.3393$me.1403354@WReNphoon4>, penman@myremarq.com wrote:


>With as many bright minds as we have in this community, and
>with the number of people willing to share their expertise,
>why is it that some people are accusing others of
>intellectual theft merely for having the same (or better?)
>level of programming expertise?  Absolutely unbelievable.
>Even as a non-programmer I can see where seveal people are
>going to come up with the SAME result.

I have no idea what conflict you are referring to, and wouldn't comment on
it if I did. There is a bad misconception in your reasoning, though.

Programs are as individual as written prose. If you asked 100 competent
writers to write a message about the subject you just mentioned, it is
unlikely that any of them would be word-for-word identical. For a very, very
short patch, yes, the chances of the code being the same are great. If I ask
100 people to write the wording for a stop sign, I'd get a lot of identical
responses. Anything over a few words, though, and the responses will be very
different, even if they all mean the same thing. The same is true in
programming. Anything over a few bytes, and the programs are rarely
byte-for-byte identical, even if they do exactly the same thing.

So, if you hand me two programs, each 100 bytes or so long, and they are
byte for byte identical, I'm going to strongly suspect that someone copied.
:)

Mike Westerfield