Много интересного для себя узнал из:
http://www.hollandopen.nl/mmbase/attachments/2038/isnot.pdf
Несколько выдержек. Например Микрософт запатентовал идею оператора IsNot

On May 14, 2003 the three Microsoft employees Paul A. Vick jr. (technical lead for Visual Basic), Cosica
Corneliu Barsan (member of the Visual Basic compiler team), and Amanda K. Silver (program manager
on the Visual Basic compiler team) led United States Patent Application #437822 with the title ìIS NOT
OPERATORî. The abstract of the IsNot patent application (as we will call it) reads as follows:
A system, method and computer-readable medium support the use of a single operator that
allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two variables point to the same
location in memory.
The 8 page application consists of 24 claims followed by a description of the background of the invention,
and detailed descriptions of illustrative embodiments. The rst 5 claims of the application read as
follows:
What is claimed:
1. A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system
comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the
source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated
with a rst operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the rst
operand and the second operand point to different memory locations.
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler is a BASIC-derived programming language
compiler.
3. The system of claim 1, wherein the operator is IsNot.
4. The system of claim 1, wherein the compiler comprises a scanner, a parser, an analyzer and
an executable-generator.
5. The system of claim 4, wherein the source code comprises at least one statement, and
the statement comprises a keyword representing the operator, the keyword recognized by the
scanner.
The remaining 19 claims go into more details such as the parser determining that the operator is preceeded
and followed by an operand, the fact that error messages are generated when the IsNot keyword or
one of its operands are missing, the fact that executable code is generated, and so on and so forth.


Так что все программы можно считать незаконными...
^{все наши на www.corba.kubsu.ru}