Microsoft Proves Pronouns Patentable
from the that's-just-great dept
theodp writes "Five days after arguing that the Eolas browser plug-in patent should be invalidated as obvious, Microsoft pocketed a patent of its own for Computer programming language pronouns, which covers the use of ellipses, blanks, and ditto marks as substitutes for names in a computer programming language. Perhaps the USPTO was won over by the patent's eloquent conclusion: 'Eliminating names is a substantial benefit as programmers dislike creating names.' " Sometimes, you have to wonder if folks are just sitting around trying to come up with absolutely ridiculous ideas on what to patent - just to see if they can get away with it.
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Pronouns?
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Re: Pronouns?
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Patented Pronouns
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Example from the patent text
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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Re: Pronouns?
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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