Question:
Are there any utilities that will convert an .EXE file back to a .CPP file? A friend wrote a little program for me, and I would like to alter it to better fit my needs. Since it has such a solid foundation, I didn’t want to start from scratch. My friend, of course, has since lost the original.
Answer:
It would be extremely hard to write such a utility. For starters, the logic required to come up with C++ source code to match compiled code would probably be considerably harder than the complex logic used to compile the source code in the first place.
On top of that, unless you compile with all sorts of debugging information that you understood and could translate, it would be absolutely impossible to come up with source code that contained the same variable names.
Although it might be nice in your case, it really is a good thing that it is so hard. Otherwise, people could simply uncompile any commercial program and modify it with their own copyright information.
