Re: A Patent on Continuations?

[Avi Bryant <address@hidden>]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:

> So what do we do?  Surely there is no difficulty demonstrating that
> the prior art does exist (going back to Landin's paper for
> continuations itself, or to the recent spate of publications on
> continuations for Web programming) by pointing to any number of actual
> published conference papers.  Do you think an organization such as the
> ACM or IEEE, which holds copyright on some of those papers, should get
> involved?

Before everyone gets up in arms - I'm pretty sure that the patent
mentioned is not for the concept of continuations, but for a particular
implementation technique: using a metacircular bytecode interpreter to
allow certain portions of a program to capture first class continuations
even though the underlying VM (in this case, Java's) doesn't support them.

I have no idea whether or not this patent is valid, but it's not as
clearly bogus as one on continuations would be.

Avi