Appeal No. 1998-2979
Application No. 08/274,923
the steps recited in claim 1 are not present or inherent in the teachings of Kuechlin. (See
brief at page 3.) We agree with appellant. The examiner relies at pages 4-5 of the answer
upon two quotations within Kuechlin to teach the temporarily restricting execution of the
mutators1. Appellant argues at page 4 of the brief that neither quotation addresses the
“temporarily restricting execution of said mutators while processing the corresponding
thread state for each one of said mutators.” We agree with appellant that Kuechlin does
not expressly set forth the restricting execution for processing the thread state of the
mutator programs. The examiner’s reliance upon the parallel and independent operation
does not address the thread state. While it may do this function, it does not appear to us
to be required or inherent. The examiner notes at
page 5 of the answer that it is “well known in the art” that the mark phase causes a
temporary restriction on the mutator access.
Furthermore, the examiner relies on the “fully parallel garbage collector’‘ (answer at
page 5) to teach a “very brief restriction on mutator access due to the time critical nature of
1 Here, we note that the examiner addresses the steps of the claims after the preamble and has
not clearly addressed the language of the preamble in the rejection. In the rejection the examiner
addresses plural mutator programs operating while the preamble of the claim recites “[a] method for
performing real-time computer garbage collection, for use with a plurality of data objects and with one or
more mutator programs.” (Emphasis added). In our decision, we do not address whether the claims lack
correspondence to the recited steps if only one mutator program is operating and whether Kuechlin would
teach the recited steps with only one program operating, since the examiner has not used this claim
interpretation in the discussion of the claimed invention or the applied prior art. In our view there would be
no problems with the collection of memory and thread interaction with the single program and operation
would commence after the single collection was completed.
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