Microsoft Patents 'IsNot'

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 07:36:26 +0000, Paul Robson
<autismuk at autismuk.muralichucks.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 18:35:01 +0000, Lenard Lindstrom wrote:
> 
> >> I bought a copy of this in I reckon about 1986ish. Visual Basic debuted in
> >> 1991.
> >
> > I would hope that a rewrite of Claim-2 of the patent is required before the patent
> > is accept (if it is not outright rejected). Claim-2 is too vague to be meaningful.
> > Proper definitions of "BASIC" and "derived" are missing. I imaging the patent is
> > intended to protect Visual Basic.NET rather than restrict unrelated languages
> > like Delphi and Python anyways.
> 
> It's blatantly obvious to me that the C# classes, ASP.NET etc. are knock
> offs of the Delphi design. They also bear little resemblance beyond the
> most basic syntactic stuff to VB6.0 let alone VB1.0

I think that Delphi is *so* underated when it comes to language &
framework design... Delphi suffered from a couple of problems; first,
it was Pascal's child, and not C; also, because it was a proprietary
project, owned by a single company.

For some reason, being a Pascal descendant was regarded as a big "no"
by a huge part of the industry, not to mention academia, that was at
that time fascinated with the prospect of C++. I wonder what could
have happened if Delphi (maybe with another name -- P++ anyone?) was
widely adopted instead of C++ for big projects...

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com