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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Questions, concerns about ANDF
Message-ID: <3884@ima.ima.isc.com>
Date: 10 May 89 05:25:01 GMT
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>> intermediate compiler format, encrypted source, or tagged 
>                                ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^
>I don't understand how this would meet the criteria.  If the format were
>encrypted source, an ANDF compiler system would have to contain the
>decryption algorithm...

Think "obfuscated", as in "Obfuscated C Content", not "encrypted" in the
traditional sense.  In practice, if ANDF is to be truly architecture-
neutral, it's going to have to be some form which is more or less source
code in disguise.  The disguise, however, can be made pretty thorough
even without resorting to binary tokenized formats.  As witness some of
the stuff that appears in the above-mentioned contest.  A prettyprinter
would still bring out control structure, but data structure could be
obscured pretty thoroughly, to the point where figuring the code out would
be almost as hard as disassembling binaries.  (Good disassemblers can pretty
much reconstruct the control structure, so you're not really losing much
by the availability of the prettyprinter route.)

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
[This point is well taken, though it is my impression that ANDF is supposed to
support multiple source languages.  -John]
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