Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
could be used to supplement and expand the record, there never would be
any certainty about what a patent discloses.
Patent Owner cites (Br. 93) the following description from Aho &
Ullman, Principles of Compiler Design (1977), p. 6:
The first phase, called the lexical analyzer, or scanner,
separates characters of the source language into groups that logically
belong together; these groups are called tokens. The usual tokens are
keywords, such as DO or IF, identifiers, such as X or NUM, operator
symbols such as = or +, and punctuation symbols such as parentheses
or commas, the output of the lexical analyzer is a stream of tokens,
which is passed to the next phase, the syntax analyzer, or parser.
It is argued that "[t]he lexical analyzer of a compiler checks against its
dictionary the spelling of the English words within a source code program in
the same manner that the spelling of English words in a document (for
example) can be checked" (Br. 93). It is also argued that a computer
program compiler performs spelling checking and grammar checking in the
same manner as for English words in a document and, therefore, "one of
ordinary skill in the art would understand . . . that the lexical and syntactic
analyzers could be adapted to check the entered words in accord with the
spelling and basic grammatical rules of any natural language" (Br. 95).
Again, the test for possession of the claimed invention is not what
would have been obvious to one skilled in the art or whether one skilled in
the art would understand that the system could be "adapted" to perform
some other undisclosed function, but what is actually disclosed. The '604
patent does not describe or suggest lexical and syntactic analyzers for
checking words and sentences of a natural language. The description of
compilers in Aho & Ullman does not hint that a compiler is equivalent to a
138
Page: Previous 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013