On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, GP lisper wrote:
The safe way would be a "Chinese Wall". Have someone that has looked at the code describe it (at high level, certainly not line-by-line) to someone that has never seen the code.
As far as I can tell this is quite unecessary. As long as you can make a case that the reimplementation is an independent effort, not derivative.
I would personally feel quite comfortable reimplementing xref.lisp (not that I have the time to do it) despite having read it. I would even feel comfortable to _refer_ to it while writing another implementation: "I wonder how it dealt with LET?". If the original author had a problem with that I they could sue me.
IANAL, but I don't let that bother me.
Cheers,
-- Nikodemus Schemer: "Buddha is small, clean, and serious." Lispnik: "Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs."