Appeal No. 2000-1238
Application 08/566,638
semaphore is owned by another node, that other node
relinquishes ownership so that the semaphore operation
can be performed.
(Emphasis added.)
The examiner's case for obviousness is stated as follows:
Holt et al[.] refers to nodes and does not teach
classes. Decouchant et al[.,] however, shows a
semaphore which can be concurrently assigned to more
than one class in an object-oriented environment
(subclassing and overloading, section 5 synchronization
and inheritance.)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary
skill in the art to provide semaphores for classes
since such semaphores reduce the number of processes
and allow efficient blocking of other objects.
(Bolding omitted.) Paper No. 13, at 3. The remarks in the
Answer suggest the examiner is proposing to modify Holt's system
so as to employ object-oriented programming at the various nodes,
to assign object-oriented semaphores of the type taught by
Decouchant and Booch to single classes and multiple classes, and
to store the assignment information for the object-oriented
semaphores in Holt's semaphore ownership table 24, which also
stores ownership information about Holt's semaphores that are
associated with the shared resources. Thus, the examiner reads
claim 1 on Holt as modified in the following manner:
Holt et al. shows a plurality of indices (section for
each node, col. 3 lines 19-20) residing in said storage
means, wherein each of said plurality of indices
defines a class . . . ;
-7-
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