Patent ID: 7065753

Claim:
A method, executed on a computer system, of validating a syntactical statement employing a stored syntax tree representing all possible syntax options by means of a network of junction nodes and data nodes between a root node and an end node, such that all paths through the tree lead to the end node, said method comprising the steps of: passing said syntactical statement to the root node and parsing said syntactical statement into elementary tokens in the root node; maintaining the location of a current node in the syntax tree, whereby said current node is initially the root node; returning potential nodes that can be selected from the current node and their distances from the current node; in response to said returning step, comparing the potential nodes to the stored tokens and selecting a potential node corresponding to one of said stored tokens if such a corresponding node exists; updating the location of the current node to that of a selected node, repeating said returning, comparing and selecting steps wherein the syntactical statement as validated if the end node is reached.