[Haskell-cafe] Patents on Maybe and Tuple

[Richard O'Keefe]

The Australian system ran an experiment about 20-some years ago
where they put some pending patents on-line and invited people
to tell them about prior art.  I did this for an attempt to
patent decimal arithmetic...

On Fri, 1 Feb 2019 at 11:28, Jack Kelly <jack at jackkelly.name> 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 <raoknz at gmail.com> 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 <saurabhnanda at gmail.com>
> 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?
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