Appeal No. 1998-0049
Application 08/289,028
are present," which require conditional execution of an
instruction depending on the set of status conditions
selected by the mask bits.
Appellants generally agree with the Examiner's
characterization of the teachings of Itomitsu (Br4) and,
hence, we will not further discuss the reference.
Appellants argue that the four bit "mask" field in
Vandierendonck selects one of 16 digit masks in the encoder
and decoder arrays of digit mask logic 35, as described at
col. 13, line 12 to col. 14, line 9, and thus
"Vandierendonck's 'mask' is actually in the encoder and
decoder arrays, and not in the instruction, as claimed by
Appellants" (Br5).
We do not find where the Examiner clearly answers this
argument. Nevertheless, claim 61 does not expressly require
a one-to-one correspondence between mask bits and status
conditions and, therefore, claim 61 does not preclude the
mask bits from being encoded mask bits that are decoded to
produce the actual mask bits to be used to select status
conditions.
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