US Patent Application 17664835. Space- And Time-Efficient Enumerations simplified abstract

Space- And Time-Efficient Enumerations

Organization Name

Oracle International Corporation

Inventor(s)

Mario Wolczko of San Carlos CA (US)

Space- And Time-Efficient Enumerations - A simplified explanation of the abstract

This abstract first appeared for US patent application 17664835 titled 'Space- And Time-Efficient Enumerations

Simplified Explanation

The patent application describes a method for implementing efficient enumerations in computer systems.

• Enumerations are a way to define a set of named values in programming.
• This method allows for the creation of an enumeration class with multiple constant values.
• The values are stored in memory along with a lookup table that references the stored objects.
• Instead of storing the entire object, only the ordinal value (position in the enumeration) is stored in memory.
• When needed, the ordinal value can be used to retrieve the corresponding object from the lookup table.
• This approach saves space and time compared to traditional methods of storing and retrieving enumerations.

Original Abstract Submitted

Systems, computer instructions and computer-implemented methods are disclosed for implementing space- and time-efficient enumerations. An instance of an enumeration class may be created with a constant, plurality of enumerations. A plurality of objects corresponding to the respective enumerations may be stored in memory along with a lookup table indexed by respective ordinal values of the plurality of enumerations, the lookup table including respective references to the stored objects of the instantiated enumeration class. A reference to an enumeration may be stored in a memory location by storing an ordinal value of the enumeration. A determination may then be made to convert a stored ordinal value to a reference to an object, and responsive to the determination, the ordinal value may be loaded and used as an index into the lookup table to obtain the reference to the object corresponding to the enumeration.