Re: [Haskell-cafe] Patents on Maybe and Tuple

IANAL, but from what I have seen said about this by IP lawyers: The USPTO doesn’t seem consider it their job to adjudicate things like this. They let most stuff through for the courts to sort out.

On Jan 31, 2019, at 3:28 PM, Jack Kelly wrote:

It's great that we know this, but does anyone who knows the patent system know that we know this?

-- Jack

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 12:30 AM Richard O'Keefe wrote:

...

Haskell's "Maybe t" is essentially the same as ML's "'t option". ECMA Eiffel has a distinction between "T" and "T?" types which is related. The idea of a compiler system with multiple front- ends for dissimilar languages goes back to Burroughs (where type checking applied cross-language) and to Univac (where several languages used the same back end) and with multiple source languages sharing a common IR with multiple target-specific back ends goes back at least to the Amsterdam Compiler Kit. Back in 1984 the idea of retaining code in an intermediate form until it was about to be executed with so far from novel that I used it in a design. JIT compiling goes back at least to Brown's "throw- away compiling" for BASIC (compact IR, bulky native code compiled into a smallish buffer at need and periodically thrown away) and commercial Smalltalk systems. (And there is at least one Smalltalk out there with Lisp and Prolog syntax on offer as well.) Then there is the Poplog system, which incrementally compiled ML, Common Lisp (CLtL1 vintage), Pop-11, and Prolog, all quite different looking (and Pop-11 being arguably OO), into a common IR, with native code generation for multiple target processors.

There may well be innovative things in Swift, but nothing in this thread would have seemed novel 30 years ago.

On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 16:54, Saurabh Nanda wrote:

...

...

Are the patents each not effectively processor-specific?

Alfred, if you're saying this because of the following clause in the independent claim...

...

compiling the first and second intermediate representations using a back-end compiler that is specific to a target processor.

...then I'm not so sure, because isn't every backend compiler specific to an architecture/processor? _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.

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