Comment by saagarjha

I'm having a hard time getting a clear picture what this actually entails. I am in violation if I reimplement Swift without forking the project (i.e. a "clean room reimplementation")? If I'm designing my own language, am I no longer allowed to include optional chaining? If so, I'm pretty disappointed with this direction, since it runs counter to the entire point of accessible programming languages, including many of the ideas that Swift itself uses. Imagine if there were patents on C: software development would be far further behind than it is today, because nobody would be able to make a compiler for it or reuse its syntax or features in any new programming languages. I'm not seeing any benefits aside from a vague "it protects Swift users from patent trolls", but I'm not sure I understand how this argument works.