Re: Disassembler


Pete Dashwood wrote:

I still can't see much point in going to all the trouble of disassembling
code ifyou have the source. If you DON'T have the source, then disassembling
it is really not going to help much... Maybe, if it is absolutely Mission
Critical code and you really MUST amend it. Personally I wouldn't. I'd take
the opportunitiy to rewrite it. But then, in my case it would be component
based and I don't NEED the source anyway :-).

Pete.


I may be misleading you slightly. The program that source-recovery.com
uses reconstitutes the cobol code from the executable (disassembles
first then pattern matches for code equivalent to assembled cobol
verbs). If you have the fd then they use that to give "meaningful" data
names to items ('Pete the delete' was well known for using PH1 and PH2
as variable names, being his initials).

As for not needing the source if, as a new boy, you were asked to use a
pre-existing component to provide a certain function, how would you
know with what parameters to invoke it? unless you had perfect
documentation (of which source code is the prime example).

.