Appeal No. 2001-0653
Application 08/820,736
storage area that stores profile data related to a procedure or
routine, which is taught by Profiler.
Claim 20 recites "a hierarchical profile data storage system
... including a mechanism for creating unique module counter
areas for each program module and unique procedure counter areas
for each procedure." Claim 32 recites "for each source code
module, initializing a module counter area; for each procedure in
the module, initializing a procedure counter area within said
module counter area." The claims in Group 1 are argued by
appellants to stand or fall with claim 1 and, so, these other
claim limitations are not at issue. However, we offer some
comments on claims 20 and 32 for appellants' benefit. Profiler
stores profile information about each module in the program and
each area (routine or procedure) in the module. This data has a
"hierarchical" relationship as broadly recited in claim 20; the
data structure is not specifically claimed. Profiler must have
storage areas corresponding to module counter areas and procedure
counter areas as recited in claim 32 in order to be able to
display the statistics according to the module and area
(procedure) in the Execution Profile window (pp. 13-14 & 55-56).
The "module storage area" in claim 32 consists only of "procedure
counter areas" and the storage area for the count data for
procedures for a module in Profiler is considered a "module
storage area." Although claim 32 uses the terms "module counter
- 14 -
Page: Previous 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007