Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.

Do you have a source for this? Not trying to argue, I would genuinely like to read more.

>SBCL derives most of its code from CMU CL, created at Carnegie Mellon University. Radical changes have been made to some parts of the system (particularly bootstrapping) but many fundamentals (like the mapping of Lisp abstractions onto the underlying hardware, the basic architecture of the compiler, and much of the runtime support code) are only slightly changed. Enough changes have been made to the interface and architecture that calling the new system CMU Common Lisp would cause confusion - the world does not need multiple incompatible systems named CMU CL. But it's appropriate to acknowledge the descent from the CMU hackers (and post-CMU CMU CL hackers) who did most of the heavy lifting to make the system work. So the system is named Steel Bank after the industries where Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, respectively, made the big bucks.

For a guy who complains about reddit so much, you sure seem intent on having a deliberately obtuse reddit-style "gotcha" argument. I'm not really here for that. I hope you remain safe from phone images that scandalize you and those around you.

Do you (or anyone else) have an example of this happening?