Re: Help on disassembler/decompilers

In article <HOW.90Sep5173755@sundrops.ucdavis.edu>, wwho@ucdavis.edu (W. Wilson Ho) writes:
> I am looking for any information related to disassembling
> object code into assembly langauge or even higher-level language such
> as C. Would someone please give me pointers to program sources,
> documentation or papers related to this?
> [Turning object code back into assembler is pretty straightforward, and
> every debugger does it. Someone else asked about disassembling into higher
> level languages a little while ago, but I didn't see any responses. -John]


There's no unique mapping from machine code to HLL and hence (unlike machine
code to assembler) no simple algorithm (your algorithm might recognize
something it thinks is a loop but is it a for loop, a while loop or just
something hacked together with gotos? that's before you even think about what
optimized machine code will look like). You could probably figure out a
complicated algorithm but to what purpose, since with no symbol table the HLL
code will not be significantly more readible than the assembler code anyway.
--
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie
--

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