Appeal No. 2002-0276
Application 09/033,614
Invention
The invention relates to Object Oriented Programming. See
page 1 of Appellants’ specification. The two fundamental
concepts of Object Oriented Programming are “encapsulation” and
“reusability”. Encapsulation means that information and the
means for using the information are conceptually packaged into
individual entities call “objects.” The objects represent
individual operations or groups of operations that can be
performed by a computer system. The information contained in an
objected is called data and the means used to perform a
particular operation upon the information is called a method.
Reusability means that the objects are made sufficiently generic
so that they can be used by methods of other objects. See page 2
of Appellants’ specification. Objects are also considered to be
members of a particular “class” of objects. See page 3 of
Appellants’ specification. Appellants’ invention is an enhanced
object-oriented mechanism that is used to change a specific
object instance from being a member of one class to being a
member of another class. See pages 26 and 27 of Appellants’
specification as well as figures 10A and 10B.
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