Patents, oh my ....

Check out Feldman's Associative Triples (and Rovner's implementation 
of them for a swapping device) from the mid60s, HASHCONS and other 
similar schemes for Lisp and later, some of the early Smalltalks for 
various other ways of achieving similar useful results ....

As is so often the case, prior art is ... well ... prior.

Cheers,

Alan

At 5:04 PM +0200 8/9/03, Roel Wuyts wrote:
>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


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