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| Authored by: PolR on Tuesday, May 15 2012 @ 08:28 PM EDT |
| What this discussion shows is that thee is room for arguments. You have your
idea and can support it. A far as I am concerned this view is as good as any
other which has been proposed. But it is not the only opinion that is defensible
and the patent doesn't offer enough information to make an informed opinion. In
presence of conflicting opinions, the jury must decide without guidance. In my
view this is a real problem.
I object to this part of your
comment:
Obvious Dalvik can't infringe on that, because it can't
contain strings in the instructions either directly or indirectly. The case
Oracle's trying to pull in though involves the use of numbers, not strings, as
symbols.
Dalvik supports pointers. They can point to strings, or
to classes which includes string fields. So yes Dalvik code can include strings
indirectly, in the form of pointers. In bugstomper's original post he shows some
code which do exactly this. He explains the following:
For you
non-programmers who skipped over the block of code instead of just stopping
reading this comment, here is what the above code means: The function takes a
string which is the name of the field, plus another string that specifies some
other information about the field called a "signature", and it goes through
every field of the class, one by one, comparing the name and signature of that
field with the name and signature being looked for. When it finds a match, it
returns a pointer directly to that field.
That lookup of a name as a string
in a list of items one of which contains the same string, that is exactly what
is meant in common programming parlance by "resolve a symbolic reference".
bugstomper's story is not the same as yours and he refers to code
to support his view.
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