Appeal 2007-0506
Application 09/998,511
BACKGROUND
The claims are directed to an apparatus, program product, and method
utilizing an "inheritance breakpoint" to assist in debugging an object-
oriented computer program having a method identified in a base class or
interface and implemented by at least one method implementation in another
class that depends therefrom. Methods may have multiple implementations
which use the same name or identifier, so when a program makes a call to a
particular method, it may not be readily apparent to the programmer exactly
what implementation of the method will be executed as a result of the call.
Creation of an inheritance breakpoint for a particular method responsive to a
user request typically results in the automated generation of a breakpoint for
all or a subset of the implementations of that method, freeing a user from
having to manually determine what particular implementation(s) implement
that method. See Abstract; Specification 3-4.
For example, Figure 7 illustrates a portion of a computer program 162
including a definition 164 for an interface ("MyInterface") and two
definitions of classes ("MyClass1" and "MyClass2") that implement the
MyInterface interface. An identification of a method "MyMethod()" is
provided at line 2 of the interface definition, with implementations of the
method defined in each class definition at lines 5-7 and 10-12. The classes
are separate program entities (a "program entity . . . may be any of a number
of different program structures supported by an object-oriented
programming environment within which a method may be identified and/or
defined, e.g., a class, an abstract class, an interface, etc."
2
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