From: wilson <winslole@udayton.edu>
Subject: Re: Reverse engineering Ada's compiled code
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:28:36 -0400
Date: 2013-03-15T21:28:36-04:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <op.wt0mdy0j1hq4pq@leon-hp> (raw)
In-Reply-To: khvfr2$hf4$1@speranza.aioe.org
On Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:47:46 -0400, <tmoran@acm.org> wrote:
>> 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.
Long ago as a graduate assistant, I wrote a program to translate !BM 7074
programs from machine language to assembler language. This is perhaps a
third of the way to what you are asking. It was a fairly easy program to
write, so I assume that going the rest of the way to a higher level
language would not be too difficult.
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prev parent reply other threads:[~2013-03-16 1:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2013-03-15 13:14 Reverse engineering Ada's compiled code Dufr
2013-03-15 15:35 ` Gautier write-only
2013-03-15 15:47 ` tmoran
2013-03-16 1:28 ` wilson [this message]
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