You need a backup strategy in case the judge or jury regard
"symbolic reference" as including both direct and indirect symbolic
references.
It's called a JMOL or an appeal, since the words of
the patent do not admit of such an interpretation. Does the phrase "no
reasonable jury" ring a bell?
Gosling, the inventor named in the
patent, had in mind indirect symbolic references (which are, after
all, the only
symbolic references in standard Java bytecode).
I'm sure Gosling
knew that, but his knowledge, understanding and intent — any aspect of his
frame of mine — fade to total irrelevance in light of the plain wording of
the patent. An indirect reference to a symbolic reference is not a symbolic
reference itself: it's an indirect reference, plain as day. An indirect
reference in an instruction is not a symbolic reference in the
instruction. Unless the plain words of thee patent allow in an
instruction to mean referred to by an indirect reference in an
instruction, Oracle and their hirelings are leading everyone on a wild goose
chase. YMMV, but I don't want to spend any more time chasing geese, wild or
tame.
If getting to the data that the bytecode instruction wants to
use requires looking up a string
identifier, it's a symbolic
reference.
In the cases of interest, yes, a symbolic reference
occurs — but it's not where the patent would apply: it's used by the
instruction, certainly, but it's not in the instruction. Essential
elements of understanding stuff like this include the avoidance of conflation of
different ideas, keeping levels of discourse separated, and avoiding misleading
shortcuts.
A key concept that must not be confounded is "looking up". A
non-symbolic reference does not require "looking up", at the level of discourse
in which it's being used.
A non-symbolic reference, whether in an
instruction or somewhere else, is one with a deterministic, a priori
correspondence with the referent; a symbolic reference has, by definition,
non-deterministic (in the data-dependant sense) a priori unknown
correspondence to be resolved by consulting a correspondence table – often
known as a directory.
(At a lower level, non-symbolic reference might
require "looking up" – resolving a virtual-memory address may require
looking up part of the address in some table, but that's at a much lower level
than what we're discussing. In any case, it might be a simple indexing
'lookup', or it might be associative. Only in the latter case is it even
remotely a symbolic reference.) ---
--Bill. NAL: question the answers,
especially mine. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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