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1. 

   NOBODY, 16 Jun 2004 @ 9:07am

   
   

   No Subject Given

   And these are the patents that are getting through. Can you imagine what they reject?

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2. 

   acb, 16 Jun 2004 @ 9:17am

   
   

   Pronouns?

   You mean like $_ in Perl?
   

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3. 

   Anonymous Coward, 16 Jun 2004 @ 9:28am

   
   

   Re: Pronouns?

   Probably more complex, does anyone actually have an example???

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4. 

   Gary Potter, 16 Jun 2004 @ 9:30am

   
   

   Patented Pronouns

   There are attorney firms that specialize in all things patent. Heck, they even write them up and they make wheelbarrows of money doing it.

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5. 

   Anonymous Coward, 16 Jun 2004 @ 10:56am

   
   

   Example from the patent text

   B) Pronoun processing program 650 can also be implemented as a parser extension of translator 610 using structure-based substitutions. In this case, explicit and anonymous pronouns are handled as a special case by the parser and the resulting parse tree is manipulated appropriately. Parser extensions can implement anonymous pronouns to the extent that a language grammar that includes them can be written unambiguously. Because they lack a semantic understanding of the program, parser extensions remain a form of substitution, but are more powerful than preprocessors. To illustrate, the following example can be implemented with a parser extension, but not with a preprocessor:
   
   area=rectangle[i].width* $( ).height;
   
   For this example, the use of the pronoun "$( )" refers to the previous left-hand side of a "." operator (i.e., rectangle[i]).

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6. 

   mschaef, 16 Jun 2004 @ 2:15pm

   
   

   Re: Pronouns?

   Paul Graham wrote about something like this in his book On Lisp: anaphoric macros. Basically, his macros allow the result of the controlling expression of an if...then...else or while loop to be easily accessed within the body of the statement.
   Here's a simple example:
   
   (aif (assoc msg-id *compiler-message-table*)
     (cdr it)
     (error "Compiler message not found!" msg-id))
   The statement assoc attempts to find a message in a message table. It returns false if the message wasn't found and a tuple containing the message if it was found. Now, if it was found, the 'it' in the second line of code refers to the result of the assoc, thus avoiding the need to explicitly declare a variable to retain the result. (which, of course, the aif macro does internally)
   Given that the technique predates the book, and the book was published in 1993 (http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html), I think that this qualifies as prior art for a fair bit of the patent. It's either sad that 1) Microsoft's developers didn't know about this or 2) Microsoft chose to ignore it, and not include the reference in the patent they chose to file anyway.
   (BTW, the Lisp macro to implement anaphoric if is about four lines of code. Not many other languages can make that claim.)

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