I did wonder why the authors bothered to convert from FORTRAN to C++...
but I think they did that as a separate activity, previously, for other
reasons. There's a comment in their paper about not using automated
translators, too (presumably to avoid any sort of claim that the output
of the translator is somehow contaminated with the proprietaryness of
the translator? Kind of like Intel copyrighting the assembler
instruction mnemonics for the 8080, so Zilog had to use different ones)

Probably it's just a historical artifact.. when they started their
development a while ago, they happened to start with the Richmond code,
as opposed to the Burke and Poggio code.

FORTRAN is pretty much a dead language, although you will find strong
argument to that statement in some math circles. While I do agree that
language makes little difference to software engineers, most being
fluent in many/multiple languages, a C translation just keeps the code,
more, up-to-date.

And, none of the above is of any real importance, other than complete,
or even substantial fragments of, programs can be copyrighted. But, I
am sure there are millions of "for statements", etc. in code that are
exact duplicates of some found in Microsoft Windows, etc. To claim that
the truths of mathematics is patentable is just stoopid.

However, all that said, there are such things as "encoder algorithms",
for an example, and such, which are so narrow and contain such an exact
and specific set of math instructions to execute and obtain reproducible
results from, that the validity for a patent is quite obvious. However,
as has been demonstrated, for any patented algorithm which has yet been
created, a freeware solution which is either so close in effectiveness
as to make it a moot point, or even greater in effectiveness--an example
is MP3 format (patented) as relates to Ogg Vorbis format (public domain.)

The future where patents cause real road blocks in software development,
or even "hoops to be jumped through", is still in software engineers'
future.

Regards,
JS