Steven Schveighoffer wrote: > On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:51:11 -0400, Daniel Gibson > <metalcae...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Am 26.10.2011 23:38, schrieb Steven Schveighoffer: >>> >>> But it's much harder to reverse engineer how someone built a machine >>> than it is to reverse engineer how software is built. >> >> Really? >> I guess it depends on the machine but I imagine it isn't so hard to >> dismantle a machine to find out how it works? (But I have no >> experience with that, it's just a guess) >> Reverse Engineering software can be pretty hard if the author made it >> deliberately hard, like Skype. > > If you have no idea how a material is built, such as a new kind of > glass, you have to guess. There are often few clues left behind of > how to build a physical machine. This is not the same for software, > which can always be disassembled. >
That just gets you the assembly code. There are many high-level concepts that are missing from that. But that's not even that important. The software didn't just get specified on it's own. Someone had to think of it. Reverse-engineering, then, really isn't. It's just taking stabs at it. Dissassembly does not achieve figuring out how the software was engineered, how it came to be, and other things.