[fpc-pascal][OT] rant on patent issues

[Jonas Maebe]

On donderdag, jan 9, 2003, at 16:02 Europe/Brussels,  
vkrish at vkrish.cjb.net wrote:

> I came across this (it's a s/w patent on method pointer).
>
> http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph- 
> Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/ 
> srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6185728'.WKU.&OS=PN/6185728&RS=PN/6185728
>
> I was wondering if FPC implements method pointers the same way as is  
> documented
> in the above patent.

Yes.

> I presume LCL, FPGUI all use method pointers (its the single most
> beautiful feature of the language). So will there be any issues to
> contend with in regard to the above mentioned patent ?

As Florian said already, software patents don't exist in Europe. I do  
wonder whether there isn't any prior art for it though, since this  
patent was filed in 1996 and there were already a lot of object  
oriented languages out there at the time.


Jonas