Appeal 2007-0224
Application 09/754,785
The Examiner disagrees. In particular, the Examiner notes that the
lorder and tsort functions allow the resulting library to be organized to allow
a single sequential pass over the files to resolve all undefined references (See
Levine, p. 5). During this sequential pass, the linker will include the
appropriate object files (Id. at p. 6). Thus, the Examiner concludes that there
is no need to store the entire module in memory during this single sequential
pass because the linker only has to search forward (sequentially) through the
library (Answer 7-8, emphasis added).
We find the recited step of “receiving a software module sequentially,
the software module having at least one symbol reference” is disclosed by
Levine, as follows (see also discussion of claim 1, supra):
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.
(Levine 5, emphasis added).
With respect to the recited limitation of “linking the software module
onto a target memory space,” we find that Levine inherently links the
software module onto a target memory space. We note that Levine discloses
UNIX® libraries created with the “ar” command that is used to combine
files into archives (Levine 5). We find the archived library files are
necessarily stored somewhere in computer storage (e.g., on a disk drive, or
in memory).
We acknowledge that Levine fails to expressly disclose the recited
functional language of “resolving the at least one symbol reference without
storing the entire software module in local memory while the symbol
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