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

[vkrish at vkrish.cjb.net]

> 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.
> 
Well, actually Objective-C in the OpenStep framework uses a similar technique (its called target-action paradigm). But the difference is Objective-C uses a central message dispatcher instead of a VMT based approach for dispatching messages.
 
cheers,
-Krish