Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
word processor with spelling and grammar checking. Also, Patent Owner
appears to be mistaken in stating that a compiler performs spelling checking.
Nothing in the description of the lexical analyzer in Aho & Ullman mentions
spelling checking. The analyzer merely breaks a string of characters into
groups, called tokens, which may be keywords, identifiers (variable names),
symbols, and punctuation marks, and passes the string of tokens to the
syntax analyzer—it does not check to see whether the keywords, for
example, are spelled correctly. While, perhaps, the compiler might generate
an error if a token is misspelled, it would be because the token is not
recognized, not because its spelling has been looked up in a dictionary. One
of the references cited in Mr. Reiffin's declaration states that collecting
sequences of characters into meaningful units "can be thought to perform a
function similar to spelling" (¶ 9) but this is not the same as spelling.
Patent Owner argues that limitations to "words" and "sentences" are
not new matter because "[h]high-level program source code comprises many
ordinary English (or other natural language) words, using the same ASCII
code used to represent natural language text in a computer" (Br. 95-96), such
as "BEGIN," "END," "THEN," "WHILE," "DO," etc. (Br. 96; Br. 97)).
Patent Owner argues that the Examiner erred in rejecting claims that contain
limitations to "language code" and "natural language" because "the language
used in source code of the illustrative embodiment is made up of 'words' —
indeed, English language words — and so the phrase 'words of a language' is
fully supported by the specification even under the Examiner's crabbed
interpretation" (Br. 98) and "persons of ordinary skill would have
understood that the disclosed invention was applicable to both natural and
computer programming languages" (Br. 98).
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