On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 13:54:57 -0500, Gilbert Saint-Flour
<usenet5678@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I found this page by accident a moment ago:
>
http://patents.nimblewisdom.com/patent/5946484-Method-of-recovering-source-code-from-object-code
>
> It's a patent issued in 1999 by the USPTO for a disassembler, which
> wasn't a
> new concept back then (I've written my first disassembler in 1982).
>
> The problem is that the language of patents is so arcane that it's
> difficult
> to spot the original elements of this patent, or if there's any
> originality
> in it at all. Hopefully, one of you will dig something up.
>
It appears to be more than just a dissassembler, based on the generated
assembly code it looks for known patterns charateristic of the IBM Cobol
compiler and attempts to symthesize the Cobol source, as nearly as I can
tell in 5 minutes. But this has been done for many years, I am not sure
what is novel here.
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