[Haskell-cafe] Patents on Maybe and Tuple

[Jack Kelly]

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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