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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for March 20th, 2014

[FOSDEM 2014] Visualizing Delphi with Moose – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/20

Jus finished watching this very interesting talk from the last FOSDEM 2014 conference: [FOSDEM 2014] Visualizing Delphi with Moose – YouTube.

It is based on MOOSE (an open-source platform for software and data analysis) and PHARO (a free and open-source Smalltalk environment).

This is how to get started (it is in Dutch, we have great developers and researchers around here).

Be sure to watch the presenter Stefan Eggermont (StackOverflow, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, FOSDEM, website www.legacycode.nl) as this kind of analysis (that is also possible for other languages and tools) can highly speedup your work.

You can download the webm version of the talk from the FOSDEV14 devroom.

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Software Development | 4 Comments »

Turbo Pascal: My 1996 answer to Q: How can I reverse a TP .EXE or .TPU back into source code?

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/20

Wow, did I really wrote that 18 years ago?

Yes I did, and I was quoted in the (back then famous) FAQPAS3.TXT from (now Professor Emeritus) Timo Salmi: The third set of frequently (and not so frequently) asked Turbo Pascal questions with Timo’s answers. The items are in no particular order.

From ts@uwasa.fi Fri Nov 8 00:00:56 1996
Subject: Decompiling a TP .EXE

56.
Q: How can I reverse a TP .EXE or .TPU back into source code?

A: This is simply asking too much. You cannot decompile a TPprogram in a manner that would give you back the original source.This method of reverse engineering is not on in actual practice.

Quoting Jeroen Pluimers jeroenp@dragons.nest.nl

“During thecompilation, important information gets lost about variables,types, identifiers etc. Writing a Pascal Decompiler is impossible.The best you can achieve is a disassembler that can help yourecognize some Pascal statements.”

Since then I learned that compilers emit highly predictable CPU code that – with the right, and sometimes complex, algorithms – can be reconstructed into language structures.

Of course you are missing the identifiers and comments, but you can some remarkable info, especially with well structured code.

Two more links about this:

–jeroen

via: FAQPAS3.TXT.

Posted in Delphi, Development, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | 2 Comments »

 
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