Santa Brings MS Patents for Editing, Compiling Code
from the good-work,-patent-examiners dept
theodp writes "Courtesy of the USPTO, Microsoft found two new patents under the tree this holiday season. The first covers Editing a software program in a common language runtime environment, while the second lays claims to Compiling multiple source language files that share a common library, which must come as a real shocker to members of the DEC OpenVMS Common Language Environment, IBM Language Environment (LE), and IBM Integrated Language Environment (ILE) teams. Gotta teach those patent examiners to use Wikipedia instead of Microsoft Encarta for their prior art searches! "
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HAHA! Another ridiculous patent suit in the making
"Trading Technologies, a software vendor for futures and options, Tuesday asked the world's four major futures marts for a slice of their revenues in return for protection from patent lawsuits."
This sounds like the SCO of the futures industry. Awesome!
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Correction
The first patent seems to cover things like Apple's "Fix and continue" feature (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/Xcode QuickTour/qt_fix/chapter_ 5_section_1.html).
The second one however does seem to cover the combination of the C preprocessor and the C compiler (whereby the preprocessor processes the "meta-information", whose results are then used by the C compiler). I'm not sure though.
Note that I'm not trying to defend these patents (e.g. like pretty much every other software patent, they claim the problem and not the solution), but these are not patents on the principles of compiling or editing source code.
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No Subject Given
Prior art to this may be the GNU compiler, which has multiple frontends (that process C, C++, Fortran, etc) that produce an intermediate format (LISPish) that is then fed into a backend for the actual compilation, but the patent itself is rather hard to parse.
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