Appeal No. 1996-3089
Application No. 08/006,860
properly rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103. Thus, we will
sustain
the rejection of these claims but we will reverse the
rejection of claim 9.
At the outset, we note that Appellants have
indicated on page 4 of the brief that claims 1 through 5, 7
and 8 stand or fall together (claim 1 will be treated as the
representative claim), and claim 9 stands or falls separately.
On pages 5 and 6 of the brief, Appellants argue:
In FERGUSON the linked-list [of substrings]
is used only as a means for sorting a large database
of key records in place (i.e., without requiring
storage space much larger than the storage space
occupied by the key records themselves). Once the
key records are sorted in what is called the “merge
phase”, the key records exist in storage as a
linked-list of substrings. This linked-list of
substrings is then read in sorted order (using the
linked-list pointers) into a buffer that is used to
create the tree structure. Once the key records are
read into the buffer from which the tree is being
formed, the boundaries of the substrings and the
pointers linking the boundaries of the substrings
have no further function, so this information (the
substring boundaries and the pointers linking the
substrings) as such presumably is lost at this
point. (Bold emphasis added.)
At page 5 of the answer, the Examiner responds:
As noted in the rejection above, Ferguson
maintains pointers as [sub]strings are moved
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