IS NOT Is Patent-Pending
from the it-too! dept
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Microsoft Visual Basic .NET's Technical Lead has a patent pending for the IS NOT OPERATOR, which is described as 'the reverse of the existing "Is" operator in a BASIC programming language.' Before we need an open source AIN'T operator, how about some examples of IS NOT prior art for our friends at the USPTO? "
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I can top that
From page 96 of Smalltalk-80: The Language by Adele Goldberg and David Robson:
The book is dated 1989. However, it's the second edition and I'm reasonably sure that the operator is also described in the first, which dates back to 1983.
Of course, there are probably LISP systems from the sixties that had an is-not operator, so I'm still a piker.
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prior art as well
what a bunch of hypocrits. They know this has been around as long as bill in high school, and that it should not be patentable.
yet another illustration of how whacked the "market driven" concept of patents and everything else is these days. (my other swipe at broken government doing absurd things like that is the FCC and the airwaves, and market driven unregulated utilities).
jim
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