Zusammenfassung von EPC2000 Art 056 für die Entscheidung T1105/17 vom 11.10.2022

In T 1105/17 the board stated that it had consistently been decided by the boards of appeal (see, e.g. T 1539/09 and T 790/14) that the design or provision of programming language constructs per se did not contribute to the solution of a technical problem and could not therefore contribute to the presence of an inventive step. In the present case, the alleged effect of the new programming language construct was to "allow [...] a programmer to specify event-handling mechanisms in JAVA using more concise, less verbose syntax" in order "to make programmers more efficient" by "reducing the amount of code that programmers need to write". It was true that having to write "less verbose" source code may "spare" the programmer some "burden", namely the mental burden of having to conceive the more verbose syntax or the "mechanical" effort of inputting that code into a computer. The compiled code generated was - and was defined to be - the same as if the more verbose syntax had been used (see claim 1, lines 7-12). Hence, the invention had no effect on the compiled code eventually carried out. Moreover, the mentioned advantages were only relative to a programming language with a "more verbose" syntax. The choice of the "less verbose" programming language could not, for the purposes of inventive step, be distinguished from the choice of any programming language. Programmers may make this choice according to one or several of the following reasons: (1) according to subjective preferences, (2) according to circumstances such as which programming language has already been chosen in a given project or (3) for which the compiler happens to be available on the available hardware, but, indeed, also (4) according to which programming language provides certain commands. At least the first three were non-technical reasons for the choice. Since the claim language did not exclude these, it could be left open whether consideration (4) (contributed by the appellant) might, in certain circumstances, be acceptable as technical. The board considered that sparing the programmer some mental burden during programming was not, in itself, a technical problem. This was also the case because it could not be determined objectively: programmers may differ as to which programming constructs they find simpler to understand and deal with.