Re:Syntax control for the command line
by kainosnoema on Saturday December 28, 2013 @01:52AM
(#6974251)
It's neither prior art (though it was started prior to the recent patent publicity), nor a re-implementation (as stated in the readme, it's just a wrapper around OS X's NSLinguisticTagger).
Why can't it just be a useful tool? I'm looking forward to using it while writing project documentation and will be working on editor plugins using the JSON formatted output (https://github.com/stephencelis/syn/commit/d2d36473f7295c6cf...).
>What's the point here? Is this a demonstration of prior art? Or is it just demonstrating that a patent's technology is easily re-implemented?
No patent. iA took that back. One wasn't possible anyway -- not only this is 90% Apple's API, but even the UI implementation of this particular feature was already shown by Apple in WWDC 2011.
Because if it's the latter, that doesn't really prove anything. Patents are to protect technologies/inventions that are far easier to produce after invention than before. That's the good part of a patent, when the patent system works as designed.
If it's a demonstration of prior art though, that's pretty cool - it might help to make it more obvious, though.