The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 26, 2006
Filed:
Jan. 08, 2002
Matt Richard Hogstrom, Apex, NC (US);
Robert W. St. John, Hyde Park, NY (US);
Matt Richard Hogstrom, Apex, NC (US);
Robert W. St. John, Hyde Park, NY (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A mutability mechanism is provided for parsing an object at loading time. The mutability mechanism inserts a property into the object that indicates whether or not the object is immutable. The mutability mechanism looks at the code for the object and determines whether any other objects can modify the object. If the object cannot be modified after it is created, then the new property is set to indicate that the object is immutable; otherwise, the property is set to indicate that the object is mutable. This property can be inspected at runtime when a call is made to a program object. If an object passed as an argument is marked mutable, a clone of this object must be passed to the callee. However, if an object passed as an argument is marked immutable, a simple reference to the object may be passed as an argument to the callee.