Appeal No. 1997-0923
Application No. 08/400,414
Reference is made to the Final Rejection (Paper No. 15,
mailed December 29, 1995) and the Examiner's Answer (Paper No.
19, mailed July 24, 1996) for the examiner's complete
reasoning in support of the rejections, and to the appellants'
Brief (Paper No. 17, filed May 8, 1996) for the appellants'
arguments thereagainst.
PROBLEMS WITH THE CLAIMS
In claim 21, the limitation of "producing a Boolean
result value having a first instruction-specified state" seems
to imply that the result value is not dependent on the
condition value. However, as discussed with respect to
appellants' table 3, the result value is determined from the
condition value.
Accordingly, it is not apparent how the step of "producing a
Boolean result value having a first instruction-specified
state" can occur before the step of "performing an
instruction-specified condition function," since it depends on
the result of the condition function. A more appropriate
ordering of the steps would seem to be (1) "retrieving at
least one instruction-specified input value for the reduction
operation," (2) "performing an instruction-specified condition
4
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007