Dennis Lee Bieber  writes:

> On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 11:00:29 +0000, gareth evans 
> declaimed the following:
>
>>Thinking back to my first job, nearly 50 years ago now,
>>when I had to dis-assemble DEC's paper tape BASIC
>>interpreter in order to enhance it, I guess that
>>dis-assemblers and decompilers must now be ten-a-penny,
>>especially for programs running under Windows where
>>the structure of Windows programs is well-known with
>>an assumption that C was the source language?
>>
>  Actually, I think the use of disassemblers et al has fallen away.
> Modern processors have so many peephole optimizations and out-of-order
> execution streams that converting an executable back to assembly source is
> almost meaningless -- and getting back to a high-level language is near
> impossible. One would have to be an expert at the assembly for a processor
> to have any chance of understanding the result.

Well, in my last job I often used disassemblers.
IBM z/OS.
Very useful for understanding IBM code.

I can't see what out of order execution has to do with a disassembler.
You disassemble executables.

Since I understand Assembler, I certainly got meaning out of it
even if the original was an optimized HLL.  You can see what services
are being called.

--
Dan Espen

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