Appeal No. 1996-3089
Application No. 08/006,860
physically, and there is certainly no proffered
reason to destroy the links and no reason to presume
their loss. (Bold emphasis added.)
Looking at Ferguson, column 9, lines 10-18 we see:
The sorted substrings are essentially the
same as leaf nodes of a tree structure, in that they
comprise search keys and pointers to records.
Therefore, all that need be done [to construct a
tree] is to treat the linked list of substrings as a
set of nodes (....), and to create branch nodes
which contain search keys and pointers to such leaf
nodes. (Bold emphasis added.)
We agree with the Examiner, there is no reason to
presume the substring links (i.e., pointers to the next
substring) are lost when the substring is treated as a leaf
node. Appellants further argue at page 7 of the brief:
In the present invention, there are also
pointers to leaf nodes stored in the branch
nodes, but in addition there are
“additional pointers” in the leaf nodes which
allow a sequential search of leaf nodes without
searching other nodes (i.e., the branch
nodes). The FERGUSON system cannot do this
because the leaf pointers needed to
accomplish this are not stored in the leaf
nodes! The only place where leaf pointers
are stored in FERGUSON is in the branch
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