Yes... I'm glad to see that the patent office is reading the applications carefully. Whatever happened to "obvious to someone skilled in the art", or the fact that "!=" predates Visual Basic's IsNot? Although, since the patent only covers BASIC-derived compliers I predict that only Borland is in any real trouble here, and they'll probably get around it (assuming anyone would enforce this) by just not implementing it. So let's hear it for Microsoft and standards compliance!