> "Whole" in the sense of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" is not generally understood to imply the maximal possible scope in any given context. It's simply meant to meant to talk about how the identify an aggregation (of no particular scale) relates to the identities of its individual components.
Which is how I'm using it. An API that consists of two functions and one that consists of a billion functions have completely different scales but each whole unit has an API portion and an implementation portion. And the API portion is the recipe. It's a purely factual description of what the implementation is expected to do.
> Similarly, the API/not-API distinction is one that has to be made in contexts beyond just the relationship of function signatures to function implementations. Foo was declared as a public class, but was it meant for public consumption? Or is it intended for internal use, and was only declared public because, for practical reasons, it couldn't be declared package-private?
That doesn't affect whether the API parts of it are API parts, only whether the API is regarded as internal or not, which shouldn't be relevant to copyright. Internal APIs shouldn't be copyrightable either.
> The issue at hand really doesn't have anything at all to do with how programmers understand things.
It better, or you're in real trouble, because then all you have are meaningless zeros and ones.
