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From: tmoran@acm.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Reverse engineering Ada's compiled code
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:47:46 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2013-03-15T15:47:46+00:00
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>I have quite an unusual question to ask:  how difficult would it be to
>reverse engineer Ada's compiled code?  I am sure this question must have
  J.S. Donnelly, "A Decompiler for the Countess Computer," Navy
Electronics Laboratory Technical Memorandum 427, Sept. 1960
  It decompiled to Neliac, an Algol 58 derived language, and was intended
to take lots of the machine coded programs of the time and turn them into
Neliac, which could then be understood, modified, and compiled to other
targets.  Decompilation is a pattern recognition problem and its
difficulty depends on how complex and varied are the patterns to be
recognized.  If you just have a modest amount of machine code, manual
decompilation would be easier.
  Assisting on that project as a work-study student was my introduction to
programming.  A very good introduction to both the high-level and the
machine level language.