One thing that I don't think has been satisfactorily resolved in our discussions is whether statements that certain things are "impossible" in the supporting text affect the scope of the claims? Maybe SFLC can help clairify that.
If octave's implementation fundamentally relies on "doing the impossible" as described in the supporting text can it possibly infringe?
--judd
For me the problem is that if you restrict your reading to the claims alone it is unclear what "at the first point" means and you could possibly read it as meaning
(1) At any time between handle creation and handle evaluation, or
(2) Specifically at the time/scope that the handle is created
If you then read the supporting text it seems that (2) is what was meant. I don't really understand what influence the supporting text has over the claims (if any). It seem reasonable to me that the supporting text is meant to clarify the claims, but IANAL.
According to the supporting text it is "impossible" to correctly resolve the handle unless the data structure is created at the same time and/or in the same scope that the handle was created. To me this indicates that reading (2) of the claims is correct.
Under reading (1) you get the massively expansive claims that could cover closures, possibly most of symbolic computation, among other things (all of which have prior art). I just don't think the USPTO could possibly have granted the patent under such a broad reading of the claims.