Re: Decompilability

Aaron F Stanton <afstanto@omni.cc.purdue.edu>
16 Mar 1997 23:32:26 -0500

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Related articles
Decompilability s720@ii.uib.no (Thomas M. Farrelly) (1997-03-14)
Re: Decompilability monnier@cs.yale.edu (Stefan Monnier) (1997-03-16)
Re: Decompilability afstanto@omni.cc.purdue.edu (Aaron F Stanton) (1997-03-16)
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From: Aaron F Stanton <afstanto@omni.cc.purdue.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 16 Mar 1997 23:32:26 -0500
Organization: Purdue University
References: 97-03-063
Keywords: Java, disassemble

Thomas M. Farrelly wrote:
>
> Would the ability to be decompilable (make close to original source code
> out of a binary file) be a drawback for a programming-language?
> [Doesn't seem to have hurt Java too badly. -John]


It's more a question of the compiler and compiled code, in my opinion.
There exist ways to thwart Mocha, for example, by various obfuscators,
which merely mess up names of variables, methods, and classes, but a
more interesting one is HoseMocha, found at
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~mladue/HoseMocha.java which inserts bogus
opcodes that don't affect methods but screw up Mocha. Decompiling
programs, in my opinion, presents an interesting way to translate
source code from one language to another...maybe not into a very
human-readable form, but it can work some of the time.


Aaron F Stanton
--

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