Re: [dvd-discuss] Fwd: Australian Court rules: Films aren't software

["Robert S. Thau" <rst(at)ai.mit.edu>]

Peter D. Junger writes:
 > : data and code may be interchangeable to some extend, but it still makes
 > : sense to differ. if you have a program whose one and only purpose is to
 > : display a fixed set of data, is there a reason to call it code? none,
 > : besides sophistry.
 >
 > There are lot's of reason to call that program a computer program,
 > most importantly that it satisfies the definition of a computer
 > program that is contained in the Copyright Act.  And arfe
 > you claiming that it is sophistry to call a ``Hello World" program
 > code?  Or to call it a program?

At the dawn of this list, there was a lot of debate on this question.
One of the more interesting examples was a Postscript document ---
Postscript actually is a (somewhat Forth-like) programming language,
which happens to have output primitives which let a program tell a
printer where to put the ink.

So, it's possible to have Postscript documents which contain
compressed images, and code to decompress them.

(The flip side of the argument is that if you call Postscript
documents "programs", then you can also call plain text documents
"programs" in a language in which each character is a "command" whose
semantics are to print that character and advance one space, with a
few extras for newline, etc.  But it is possible to draw principled
distinctions here; for instance Postscript is Turing-complete, if run
on a machine with space for an infinite stack, and the "ASCII command
set" is not...).

rst