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From: megatest!djones@decwrl.dec.com (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Help on disassembler/decompilers
Keywords: disassemble
Message-ID: <13926@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Date: 18 Sep 90 22:13:42 GMT
References: <1990Sep14.181616.26890@dce.ie>
Sender: compilers-sender@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: megatest!djones@decwrl.dec.com (Dave Jones)
Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca
Lines: 13
Approved: compilers@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us

I just wrote a SPARC object-code dumper a couple of days ago. I am as much
interested in the symbol-table and relocation-information as I am in the
instructions, but I never even worried about data intertwined with the
instructions. (It helps that all SPARC instructions begin on 32 bit
boundaries, of course.) I simply have one flag that prints the text segment
as a hex and ascii dump, another that prints it as machine instructions.
Can't run the assembler over the output, but then we're not supposed to do
that are we? It's plenty good for my purposes, which is to inspect machine
code in order to infer undocumented conventions, and to verify that compiled
code is correct.
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