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From: wilson <winslole@udayton.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Reverse engineering Ada's compiled code
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:28:36 -0400
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Date: 2013-03-15T21:28:36-04:00
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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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