Microsoft Patents 'IsNot', Enlists WTO

Milhouse102 writes "I was just reading an article on The Register about Microsoft's offshore patent war following Ballmer's recent outburst in Asia. I came across this little nugget, it seems MS has patented BASIC's IsNot operator."

Comments

Not Quite

[RangerRick98]

Unless I'm mistaken, they've only applied for a patent; it has not yet been granted. Sadly, given the state of the patent system nowadays, it would not surprise me if it is granted.

Re:Not Quite

[servoled]

Yes, this is a publication of a pending patent application. The easy to tell is to look at the number: 20040230959.

Published patent applications use the format of YYYY/####### to denote the Year and the number in which the application was received.

Granted patents have the format of ####### with no year attached to denote the order in which the patent was granted. They are someone around 6,800,000 right now.

So am I infringing if...

[N Monkey]

After a quick read of the patent, it seems to say that it is a test to see if two "variables" are actually the same entity, i.e. at the same address.

That would seem to imply

#define IsNot(A,B) (&(A) != &(B))

infringes?

Surely this is done in things like memmove() to prevent overwriting of data?

Re:Is the 'Is' operator patented?

[albalbo]

Actually, they specifically admit "Is" as prior art, the example they give is:

If (Not(A Is B)) Then (Goto Z) End If

By generating an IsNot operator, such that Not(A Is B)===(A IsNot B), you're re-ordering the sentance:

If (A IsNot B) Then (Goto Z) End If

That's what they're trying to patent. The use of a keyword rather than boolean logic. I rather hope and suspect this patent will fail for insufficient inventive step.

Re:Microsoft patents ones and zeros...

[albalbo]

UK patent application GB0312175.3, someone already tried:

"The applicant appeared to be trying to protect the use of '0' and '1' in computer technology. [...] The applicant appeared to have completely misunderstood the patent system, and had not actually invented anything."

Via softwarepatents.co.uk. Well, at least *that* didn't get through. ARM's patent on the use of pointer arithmetic in CPU emulators *was* allowed, though.

IsNot IsNot in BASIC yet

[unfortunateson]

This really boils down to a RTFA, but I'll expound here:

First off, the IsNot operator is not part of VB 6.0 or VB.net 2003 (I haven't checked 2005, which is still in Beta)

Second, if you undestand VB's "Is" operator, IsNot makes more sense.

"Is" is a memory location comparison commonly used to see if two variables point to the same object, e.g.

objThisControl Is objTheControlICareAbout

. It does not compare the values of the variables, only that they are pointers to the same object.

Because there is no inverse version of this operator like there is with "=" and "", you end up with non-natural-language statements such as

If Not (objThisControl Is objTheControlICareAbout) Then

Much more natural looking is

If objThisControl IsNot objTheControlICareAbout Then

Whether this is patentable is another issue. But you can certainly patent a published idea -- it's the only way to protect it.

Re:Only pertains to BASIC

[servoled]

Each claims stands alone. So, only claim 2 would be limited to BASIC, while claims 1, 3 and 4 would apply to any programming language.

The dependent claims (2, 3 and 4) are merely shorthand to avoid writing the entire claim out each time, but for purposes of what they cover, you should read the claims like this:

1. A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated with a first operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the first operand and the second operand point to different memory locations.

2. A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated with a first operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the first operand and the second operand point to different memory locations, wherein the compiler is a BASIC-derived programming language compiler.

3. A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated with a first operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the first operand and the second operand point to different memory locations, wherein the operator is IsNot.

4. A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated with a first operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the first operand and the second operand point to different memory locations, wherein the compiler comprises a scanner, a parser, an analyzer and an executable-generator.

The relevant Blog entry of the "inventor"

[grungeman]

http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2003/11/1 7/243.aspx#Comments

And he writes that they "had requests for this in the past", so they did not even invent it, but some users suggested it.

Finally check out the comments of the VB users below wetting their pants for this little feature. Now isn't that really sad?