Re: Disassembler



"Peter Lacey" <lacey@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4403301A.2400BA98@xxxxxxxxxx
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.

I never actually posed any such question,(I am well aware of what is
"possible"; much more concerned with what is "likely"...) but I appreciate
your post, anyway :-).

Pete.



.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: the quality of assembly language code
    ... Intel's compiler is supposed to ... I have found that I prefer 'C' and assembler roughly in inverse ... >> code than human beings writing raw assembly language. ... > assembly programmers and compilers. ...
    (comp.lang.asm.x86)
  • Re: What micros do you actually hate to work with?
    ... with less than tiny asm ... hassle to work with 32 bit longs in assembler for an 8 bit uP, ... Microchip's C compiler tools and their assembly under MPLAB. ... is that other programmers for C are easier to find. ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)
  • Re: Disassembler
    ... 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. ... Programmers who have worked in high level languages all their careers and may have "some Assembler knowledge" are NOT Assembler programmers. ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Re: combination of C and assembly
    ... Read your compiler manual. ... Just write a stub for the assembler routine in C into a separate ... dummy references to the parameters in that C-file. ... disassemble it, look at the parameter passing and write your actual ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)
  • Re: combination of C and assembly
    ... Read your compiler manual. ... Just write a stub for the assembler routine in C into a separate ... dummy references to the parameters in that C-file. ... disassemble it, look at the parameter passing and write your actual ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)