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Re: How do I look inside an .exe file to view the programming

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Very well put John Dallman...nice.

~Jason


On Sunday, November 11, 2007 1:17:00 PM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <9gIZi.6511$Ew3.5251@newsfe7-gui.ntli.net>, 
> corbyguy@ntlworld.com (corbyguy) wrote:
> 
> > I have downloaded an .exe program file and I would like to look 
> > inside this .exe program file to have a look at, view and read the 
> > details of the program.
> > 
> > Does anyone know of a program that I can use to open up this .exe 
> > file so I can view and read the written program?
> 
> That's a question pretty much equivalent to asking "Where in my car are 
> the full plans and building specifications hidden?" There are ways of 
> programming where the "program" that you run is the "source code", the 
> text that the programmer writes. But pretty well none of those produce 
> .exe files. 
> 
> Most .exe files are written in programming languages that are 
> "compiled". This term has a special meaning for computer people: it 
> means translating the program from the form that a human can read and 
> write into a form whereby the computer's processor can run it. This is 
> not, in general, a reversible process. Many kinds of information that 
> humans find important or vital in working with a program's source code 
> are discarded in the process of compilation. This includes all the names 
> for parts of the program and for items of data within it, all the 
> explanatory text, and many more things not easily described. 
> 
> Further, you are in quite the wrong place to be asking this question. To 
> continue with the car analogy, you have done the equivalent of walking 
> into a meeting of metallurgists - people who develop metal alloys, not 
> cars - and asking them about your car, without knowing what make or 
> model your car is. Nobody is blaming you for this because your naivety 
> is pretty obvious, but you aren't likely to get the kind of help you 
> need. 
> 
> Do you have any experience of computer programming at all? You would 
> need that to make sense of the source code of any program. If not, you 
> may wish to learn it, but it is not something that you can pick up in a 
> few newsgroup postings. It's about as complex, and boring as chartered 
> accountancy, but much more subdivided. For example, you would expect any 
> accountant to be able to make some sense of the books of any company. 
> This is not true with programmers: if accountants were divided into 
> fifty or so different schools, of widely varying size, that did the 
> books for different kinds of companies in utterly incompatible ways, 
> disagreeing over the meanings of terms such as "profit" and "income", 
> they'd be much more like programmers. 
> 
> If you want to learn programming, expect to spend money on books about 
> it, programs for doing it, and some basic training courses. Expect it to 
> take time: months for basic proficiency, years to get good at it. 
> 
> -- 
> John Dallman, jgd@cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.

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Re: How do I look inside an .exe file to view the programming jbonejones@gmail.com - 2012-12-26 10:59 -0800

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