Re: Disassembler

Pete Dashwood wrote:

Ah, the joys of maintaining source... :-)

Don't start that again! It isn't every shop that has the luxury of no
inherited programs. Are you also saying that compiled objects never get
lost?????


There's more to disassembly than simply losing source. If you have no source
and you disassemble what you have, you will still have major problems
amending and mantaining it, especially on an ongoing basis. Disassembly is
not a silver bullet (as anyone who's ever had to do it, knows). In fact,
other than extreme and isolated circumstances, disassembly is not a solution
at all. Programmers who have worked in high level languages all their
careers and may have "some Assembler knowledge" are NOT Assembler
programmers. Even people who ARE Assembler programmers would not embrace
maintaining undocumented compiler output. (I know, because I was one...:-))


All true. While it isn't too difficult to equate assembler instructions
to the procedure division if you know the register conventions, and not
impossible to work out the file labels if you have a handy core dump,
identifying and ignoring the boiler plate/overhead code inserted by the
compiler is a bitch. And if you don't have the FD's or the copy books
available then the result is mostly meaningless. You have my sympathy
for having had to do this!

But your orginal question was to whether it's possible to have data
names without the source code. The answer is very defintely yes.

PL
.

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