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10-07-2010

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Why Software is Abstract, by PolR

Why Software Is Abstract
by PolR

Following the ruling of the Supreme Court in Bilski, the USPTO asked, in substance, how to tell an abstract idea from an application of the idea. In this article I propose an answer to the question of what makes software abstract. It is a follow up to the previous article, Physical Aspects of Mathematics.

The logic is to look at why a mathematical calculation is abstract and then see if the same logic applies to software. It happens that it does. It is possible to show that software is abstract with references to the underlying mathematical aspects. This is not, however, the topic for this article. The argument is presented without any assumption as to whether or not software is mathematics. I work from the observation that a mathematical calculation solving a mathematical problem is abstract. Then I look at what makes it abstract. Then I observe that the exact same logic is applicable to all software whether or not the law sees it as an algorithm as defined by Benson. This is not surprising. Software is mathematics and this makes it abstract, but I don't use or rely on this fact in making the arguments in this article.

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snsplit

snsplit,v0.3.8(8)					      System Manager's Manual						 snsplit,v0.3.8(8)

NAME

       snsplit - split an article stream into individual articles

SYNOPSIS

       snsplit [-r] [field... -] prog...

DESCRIPTION

       snsplit	reads  an  article stream from descriptor 0 and splits it into separate articles, invoking prog...  on each, with the article ava-
       iable on descriptor 0.  This is useful as a quick-and-dirty way of filtering an article stream.

       The incoming article stream is expected to be in wire format, with lines ending in CRLF, leading dots doubled, and delimited by a dot on  a
       line by itself.

       The  article  presented	to  prog...  will have lines that end in a bare newline, will have all header lines unfolded, leading dots will be
       unstuffed, and the article will be terminated by end-of-file.

ARGUMENTS

       prog...
	      is the program (with arguments) to run on each article.  If prog...  exits with any kind of failure, snsplit aborts.

       field...-
	      are optional header field names.	If these are specified, the value of the first header field of that name will be exported into the
	      environment.  This field...  list must be terminated by the hyphen.  See also ENVIRONMENT below.

OPTIONS

       -r     Expect input articles in rnews batch format instead.

ENVIRONMENT

       snsplit sets some environment variables.  If the environment already contains these variables, they will be overwritten.

       SEQUENCE
	      If  already set to a positive value, it is incremented for the first article.  If it isn't set, is set to one for the first article.
	      Thereafter it is incremented for each subsequent article.  The value is always a 6-digit number with leading zeroes, and it can roll
	      over.

       BYTES  contains the size of the current article.

       HEAD_LINES
	      The number of lines in the head of the article, excluding the blank separator line.

       BODY_LINES
	      The number of lines in the body of the article, excluding the blank separator line.

       FLD_FIELD
	      If  any  fields are specified on the command line, where field is the name of an article header field, then FLD_FIELD will be set to
	      the value of field, where FIELD is the same as field but with lower case characters changed to upper case, and all  hyphens  changed
	      to  underscores.	 Confusing?  If field is message-id, then FLD_MESSAGE_ID will be set to the value of the first Message-ID field in
	      the current article, if there is one.

EXIT CODES

       snsplit exits 0 on success, 1 on usage error, 2 on system error, and 3 on article format error.	If  prog...   exits  with  other  than	0,
       snsplit will also exit that value.

N.B.								    Harold Tay							 snsplit,v0.3.8(8)