I thought it "not obvious to a practitioner of the craft" was a requirement for a patent no? Give 10 programmers the task to write "rangeCheck()" and you'll end up with very similar looking code.
I had the pleasure to spend some time working with some very (very!) smart patent lawyers on a couple of cases.
Apart from feeling like I was in an episode of Boston Legal merged with The Good Wife, I was able to gain some understanding of the rules of the game. In that game things like "but it's patently obvious" gets you zero points. Any argument you advance that's based on obviousness will lead to eye rolling and deep sighs. Such arguments are extremely hard to win, it turns out. In our legal system, proving invalidity is difficult.
By contrast, things like : a comma in the wrong place in claim drafting; case moved to a different jurisdiction; tricks with filing dates; prior art (the thing I was helping with) and other noninfringement theories are greeted with enthusiasm.
I did a patent a few years ago, and that's how it felt. The patent lawyer would call me to get my version and when the application was done, it would look like it came from another plane of existence.
Phrasing like "cause a calculating machine to..." were repeated a lot. Totally unreadable, probably only makes sense if you're a lawyer.
And symptomatic of a broken system, in my view.
Keep in mind, components of an invention that's patented can be quite obvious. How a standard gearbox in a car works is well-known, but pair it up with some novel input and output or some novel use, and it's a patentable construct.
Because of how the federal system operates, its difficult for the defendant to force a change of venue here. These pro-IP jurisdictions give companies like Oracle the wins they want and all the fees and fines and lawyer hourlies add up. Its a win-win for everything but justice.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/east-texas-courts...
You can rearrange the last two if blocks and have complete interoperability, but the messages will be different. Moving that first if block, though, will change the behavior of the method by a large degree.