Appeal No. 1997-2212 Page 8
Application No. 08/233,387
re Fritch, 972 F.2d 1260, 1266, 23 USPQ2d 1780, 1784 (Fed.
Cir. 1992); In re Gordon, 733 F.2d 900, 902, 221 USPQ 1125,
1127 (Fed. Cir. 1984).
Here, as background to his invention, Robinson mentions
“migrating programs written in a high level language such as
FORTRAN ....” Col. 3, ll. 39-41. Such migration employs
“[r]ecompiling or recoding ....” Id. at l. 38. The examiner
has not shown that either of these operations teaches or would
have suggested decompiling executable machine code into
higher-level source code that is architecture-independent. To
the contrary, recompiling comprises “compil[ing] a program
again, usually because of changes that needed to be made in
the source code ....” Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary at
333 (copy attached). Because coding comprises “generating
source code in the language(s) of the programmer’s choice,”
id. at 78, recoding is generating source code in at least one
language of the programmer’s choice again.
In describing his invention, Robinson teaches translating
higher-level source code into executable machine code that is
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007