Peter Scott alerted me to a recent discussion in comp.lang.perl.misc
on this patent (this URL will redirect you to the USPTO page):
http://xrl.us/bph
Here's Peter's comment (OP==original poster):
It's nigh impossible to wade through the thousands of words of legal
BS, but I tried, and I tend to agree with the OP that this patent
appear to be for functionality substantially provided by Perl's 'use'
directive. While the patent claism to be for a generic technique for
conditional module loading, most of its illustrations are in (painfully
tortuous) Perl.
Specifically, it appears to duplicate the
use Module VERSION
form of the directive.
Can anyone make head or tail of the language? Does it pretend to
cover (or is it invalidated by) 'use Module VERSION'? It looks like
it might even apply to some kind of web templating systems, but I
can't understand enough of the "claims" to figure out what the hell
it's talking about.
Nat
