--- Brian Chase <bdc(a)world.std.com> wrote:
On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Gene Ehrich wrote:
I remember back in the early days at IBM right
before the 360 was announced
that they were talking in the industry of the possibility of a
disassembler. Most people poo-poo'd it as impossible.
Maybe hindsight is always 20/20, but I don't see why machine code
disassembly would be viewed as an impossible task? I mean, weren't people
able to look at hex or octal dumps and translate them into the
corresponding mnemonics? This generally isn't a task that requires a high
IQ, it's basically a simple lookup operation. Hell, the problem is better
suited to computer based solutions than it is to people doing it.
Think of the machines in place when the 360 was king. The real problem
isn't the instructions, it's knowing where to put labels and what is data
and what is instruction (at least, in a Von Neumann machine, unlike the
Harvard Architecture of the original questor's PIC).
I have a disassembler for the 6502, written in PET BASIC. It's dog slow,
but it does work. Most of the trouble is at guessing where the labels
should go and keeping them straight.
-ethan
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