In the wake of Real Software Inc. announcing a new version of its Realbasic application development tool, the company is concerned about a patent application Microsoft Corp. has filed that could affect all BASIC-like programming languages.
Real Software, of Austin, Texas, announced Realbasic 2005 last week at the Demo@15 conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.
The new version supports the creation of self-contained executables that run natively on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
It is Microsoft's pending patent application for what it calls the IsNot function in BASIC languages, however, that has Real Software officials concerned.
According to the patent application—filed in mid-November by Paul Vick, lead architect for Visual Basic .Net at Microsoft; Amanda Silver, a program manager on the Visual Basic team; and an individual in Bellevue, Wash., named Costica Barsan—the IsNot operator is described as a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two point to the same location in memory.
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