On Wednesday 19 March 2008 20:02:28 Alex Hudson wrote: > 1. All about using DLL libraries. The idea with a DLL is that your > program can call functions from a library, and you have to > identify that function either by name or by the index into the > library. This patent claims a slightly different way of doing the > look-ups so that when libraries are changed in the future, the > linkage still works. (Actually, I can't claim to really understand > this - it seems to be a way of keeping an ABI consistent, but not > much of it makes sense in the context of how I understand > libraries to work ;)
Hmm. If I read this correctly, it's about using a jumptable to call an interface that provides secondary functions -- probably in the sense of a provided mode parameter, or in the sense of a virtual method table, or both. I guess it could also apply to I'm no expert on (modern/unix) DLLs or patent law, but even going back to Amiga days, that seems like a basic and well established technique. As I understand this, writing two functions, fopen_binary, and fopen_ascii, and then providing an interface along the lines of fopen(x, BINARY) would qualify, if you were using the Amiga's (forwards+backwards-compatible) way of interfacing with shared libraries. -- Lee _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
