[rtperson]

> But are you really saying that these claims cover a standard linked list?

That's exactly what I'm saying. For all the patent's talk of primary, tertiary, and secondary pointers, the "invention" here is a standard linked list with sentinels. If I hired a patent attorney to write patents against the programs I wrote for my freshman-year data structures course, the results would be much the same.

[monochromatic]

I don't read these claims as referring to a sentinel node. Could you explain how you got there? (Note: I'm not really a programmer... I just tinker a little bit. So I could be wrong about that.)

And I don't have any agenda here, other than to promote intelligent discussion about patents in a place where that happens too little.