Microsoft Patents 'IsNot'

[Terry Reedy]

"Skip Montanaro" <skip at pobox.com> wrote in message 
news:16798.16559.745209.751967 at montanaro.dyndns.org...
>
> My guess is Microsoft hopes to discourage Visual Basic knock-offs.  Claim 
> 2
> clearly seems to restrict the scope to BASIC.

But Claim 1 is generic.  Not being an initiate into Patentese, I would not 
be sure is Claim 2 is a restriction or an exemplification or a backup 
claim.

> Seems pretty slimy.

To me, this confirms the depravity of software claims.

I think the Python Software Foundation should notify both the Patent Office 
and the claimant lawyers of Python's prior art of an 'is not' operator with 
the same meaning.  The necessity, for Basic, to delete the space or change 
it to '_' (and both forms, with all variations of casing, are 'claimed' as 
inventions) is because Microsoft Basic currently parses 'a Is Not b' as 'a 
Is (Not b)' instead of 'a (Is Not) b' as Python does and coupled with a 
proper reluctance to change the meaning of currently legal code.  But 
changing ' ' to '_' for pragmatic reasons is standard in programming 
languages, including Python.

Terry J. Reedy