Ask Eliot, since he implemented it for VisualWorks. I can imagine that 
either (a) the patent is now Cincom's or (b) the patent is not 
Cincom's, and then they'll know about it (after all, they have enough 
lawyers to check this out.

On Saturday, Aug 9, 2003, at 15:35 Europe/Zurich, Andreas Raab wrote:

>> I have a feeling PPS got a patent for the idea.
>
> Any idea where to find this patent? I'm not too concerned about this 
> patent
> (if it exists) as there are various other ways in which the same effect
> (being able to attach external properties to objects) can be achieved. 
> Using
> ephemerons is just a very convenient way of doing it as you don't have 
> to
> worry much about the relations in the graph of objects.
>
> Cheers,
>   - andreas
>
>
>
>
Roel Wuyts                                                   Software 
Composition Group
roel.wuyts at iam.unibe.ch                       University of Bern, 
Switzerland
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~wuyts/
Board Member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org