Appeal 2007-0224
Application 09/754,785
After carefully considering the evidence before us, we agree with the
Examiner that the language of the claim broadly but reasonably reads on
Levine’s disclosure in the manner set forth in the Answer. We note that
Levine discloses the notoriously well known “ar,” “lorder,” and “tsort”
UNIX®/Linux utilities used in combination as follows:
Tsort did a topological sort on the output of lorder, producing a
sorted list of files so each symbol is defined after all the
references to it, allowing a single sequential pass over the files
to resolve all undefined references.
The output of lorder was used to control ar.
(Levine 5, emphasis added).
As further explained by the Overby reference (provided by the
Examiner as extrinsic evidence), the output of the lorder utility is provided
as an input to the tsort utility to create a library ordering with no backward
references:
Two utilities are required to create a library order: lorder and
tsort. Lorder creates a dependency list, that is, a list of what
functions are required by what other functions. Tsort takes the
output of lorder and does a “topological sort” to create an
ordering with no backwards references.
(Overby 4, emphasis added).
In response to Appellant’s argument that reordering extracted symbols
is not equivalent to reordering software module components, we agree with
the Examiner that a broad but reasonable interpretation of the recited
“components” reads on “symbols” as found in a symbol table or directory
(i.e., where a “symbol” represents an address of a procedure, function, or
other code entry point). Indeed, when we look to Appellant’s Specification
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