?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond.
˙˙ https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully
decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
On 10/14/2026 12:18 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond.
˙˙ https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully
decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
Yeah, that one boggles the mind. Why transpile from Pascal to Rust?
I just don't see anything, not even this, as a /victory/ over closed
source. Nor have I seen the promised "software quality" in open source.
I won't read the whole article now, so I may have more to say on this
subject at a later date.
Best wishes, and happy Pascal coding!
On 10/14/2026 12:18 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond. https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler. Why do I doubt this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
Yeah, that one boggles the mind. Why transpile from Pascal to Rust?
I just don't see anything, not even this, as a /victory/ over closed
source. Nor have I seen the promised "software quality" in open source.
I won't read the whole article now, so I may have more to say on this
subject at a later date.
Best wishes, and happy Pascal coding!
?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond.
˙˙ https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=73639
"I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully
decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary.
My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal
from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal
code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it
to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection."
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Wake me when they can move FOTRAN IV programs to Rust.And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?Yeah, that one boggles the mind. Why transpile from Pascal to Rust?
Lynn
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.
Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler. Why do I doubt >this even though ESR says otherwise?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> spake the secret code <11amvre$15far$1@dont-email.me> thusly:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.
It's been around for decades. It's called Ida Pro. The NSA published
an open source one called Ghidra. It's actually not hard to recognize
the output of a particular compiler and reverse engineer stack frames, arguments, etc.
What the LLM brings to the picture is speculating meaningful
datatypes, names, patterns, etc., on top of the mechanical
decompilation.
Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
Maybe because you don't have experience with existing reverse
compilers (try Ghidra, since it's free) and LLMs?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
It's not like he converted to Prolog. Mapping from one procedurally
oriented block structured language to another is not particularly
difficult.
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler. Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
Because decompiling some languages isn't that hard. Humans can do it pretty well, although it's harder for machines. It helps a lot if you have a symbol table (which it sounds like they did in the example ESR cites).
Now... that said... I wouldn't trust anything ESR ever says and I would not hold him up as an authority.
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
That seems like a step down, doesn't it?
--scott
In article <11ar89j$2mdpm$2@dont-email.me>,
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/15/2026 9:56 AM, Richard wrote:
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> spake the secret code
<11amvre$15far$1@dont-email.me> thusly:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.
It's been around for decades. It's called Ida Pro. The NSA published
an open source one called Ghidra. It's actually not hard to recognize
the output of a particular compiler and reverse engineer stack frames,
arguments, etc.
What the LLM brings to the picture is speculating meaningful
datatypes, names, patterns, etc., on top of the mechanical
decompilation.
Why do I doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
Maybe because you don't have experience with existing reverse
compilers (try Ghidra, since it's free) and LLMs?
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
It's not like he converted to Prolog. Mapping from one procedurally
oriented block structured language to another is not particularly
difficult.
I tried Ida Pro several years ago. It was crap.
I have never tried Ghidra. Maybe someday.
Turbo Pascal was kind of amazing. Lightning fast compile on 8086, and
ran on oddball hardware like the DEC Rainbow.
On 10/15/2026 10:05 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
Lynn McGuire˙ <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I doubt >>> this even though ESR says otherwise?
Because decompiling some languages isn't that hard.˙ Humans can do it
pretty
well, although it's harder for machines.˙ It helps a lot if you have a
symbol
table (which it sounds like they did in the example ESR cites).
Now... that said... I wouldn't trust anything ESR ever says and I
would not
hold him up as an authority.
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
That seems like a step down, doesn't it?
--scott
Yes on the step down to Rust.˙ I wrote a lot of Turbo Pascal code back
in the 1980s but I have to admit that I am a C++ fanboi through and
through.˙ And at my age, it will hard to change my mind on that unless
you are writing embedded code.
I have translated over 200,000 lines of Fortran 66/77 code to C++ this
year so far.˙ Trying to get to 300,000 lines of Fortran 66/77 code
before the end of the year.
Lynn
But the attitude of not caring about speed can have grave results
when the inefficiencies pile up.
Most of our convergence methods use Newton-Raphson, yes that Isaac
Newton, to start, very quick to solve if it solves.
If that spirals out of control then we use the halving method, brute
force and very slow. If that fails then we use an interpolation
method, also very slow. If that fails (the flash is infeasible),
then we report the failure to the user.
... everything was rewritten using Structured Programming and COBOL
which had a marvellously fast file indexing system and it became
possible to read other programmers' programs with such advantages
being great for the bureau but not so demanding and therefore
rewarding for programmers.
On 23/10/2026 05:21, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:41:15 -0500, Lynn McGuire wrote:
I have been advocating for quite a while that C++ should add a
user interface programming model for quite a long time.
First they need a standardized graphics API.
I gather there?s been a proposal that?s been kicking around for
some years, to adopt something based on Cairo
<https://www.cairographics.org/>.
You need something with subsets. At least a "basic" subset, a "full"
subset, and something in between that satisfies most uses. Or maybe
subsets for different purposes, but they should all be compatible.
On 2026-10-23, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
On 10/23/26 01:01, boltar@caprica.universe wrote:
Bill Gates never earned a degree. He seemed to do ok.
From what I understand, he wasn't a very good programmer, though.
Considering how much of my career I've spent working around poor
design decisions and outright bugs in Windows, I'd say that is
self-evident.
Bill Gates wrote the Microsoft Basic compiler and interpreter for
the Altair 8080 in 2K of ram using assembly language. Take that as
you will.
On Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:37:37 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
On 2026-10-23, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
On 10/23/26 01:01, boltar@caprica.universe wrote:
Bill Gates never earned a degree. He seemed to do ok.
From what I understand, he wasn't a very good programmer, though.
Considering how much of my career I've spent working around poor
design decisions and outright bugs in Windows, I'd say that is
self-evident.
Remember that current ?Windows? actually means ?Windows NT?. Which was primarily the brainchild of Dave Cutler, who came from the nest of Unix-haters at DEC.
In short, Gates couldn?t have done what Microsoft achieved on his own.
I have one Fortran program which has an excellent graphics API, it
writes Postscript. Works fine. Can't do any mouse clicks on it and
expect anything to happen, though :-)
On 2026-10-23, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
In short, Gates couldn?t have done what Microsoft achieved on his own.
Sort of like an evil genius commanding his legion of minions...
On 10/15/2026 2:13 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
On 10/15/2026 10:05 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
Lynn McGuire˙ <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
Huh, so somebody has actually built a decent decompiler.˙ Why do I
doubt
this even though ESR says otherwise?
Because decompiling some languages isn't that hard.˙ Humans can do it
pretty
well, although it's harder for machines.˙ It helps a lot if you have
a symbol
table (which it sounds like they did in the example ESR cites).
Now... that said... I wouldn't trust anything ESR ever says and I
would not
hold him up as an authority.
And he has a translator from Borland Pascal to Rust?
That seems like a step down, doesn't it?
--scott
Yes on the step down to Rust.˙ I wrote a lot of Turbo Pascal code back
in the 1980s but I have to admit that I am a C++ fanboi through and
through.˙ And at my age, it will hard to change my mind on that unless
you are writing embedded code.
I have translated over 200,000 lines of Fortran 66/77 code to C++ this
year so far.˙ Trying to get to 300,000 lines of Fortran 66/77 code
before the end of the year.
Lynn
Be sure to let us know, we'll throw a party.
Actually, I'm close enough that that's possible.
On Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:37:37 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
On 2026-10-23, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
On 10/23/26 01:01, boltar@caprica.universe wrote:
Bill Gates never earned a degree. He seemed to do ok.
From what I understand, he wasn't a very good programmer, though.
Considering how much of my career I've spent working around poor
design decisions and outright bugs in Windows, I'd say that is
self-evident.
Remember that current ?Windows? actually means ?Windows NT?. Which was >primarily the brainchild of Dave Cutler, who came from the nest of >Unix-haters at DEC.
Perhaps it was the corporate culture with Bill Gates at the helm that >attracted Cutler to Microsoft. But look at some of the boneheaded
decisions he made (or propagated from old DOS-based Windows), just so
NT wouldn?t look like Unix, which continue to haunt Microsoft to this
day.
On Fri, 23 Oct 2026 21:00:30 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:
I have one Fortran program which has an excellent graphics API, it
writes Postscript. Works fine. Can't do any mouse clicks on it and
expect anything to happen, though :-)
PostScript was a very influential graphics API, but it is only fit for
the museum nowadays. It was designed for putting marks on paper, not
for updating pixels on a computer screen.
On Fr 23 Okt 2026 at 22:49, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
PostScript was a very influential graphics API, but it is only fit
for the museum nowadays. It was designed for putting marks on
paper, not for updating pixels on a computer screen.
There was also display postscript from SUN.
On Sun, 25 Oct 2026 16:31:56 +0100, Andreas Eder wrote:
On Fr 23 Okt 2026 at 22:49, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
PostScript was a very influential graphics API, but it is only fit
for the museum nowadays. It was designed for putting marks on
paper, not for updating pixels on a computer screen.
There was also display postscript from SUN.
Display PostScript was from Adobe.
You could be thinking of NeWS, which was from Sun. It slightly
predated X11, and they pretty much abandoned it after adopting X11
wholesale, like the entire rest of the Unix industry.
But neither Display PostScript nor NeWS made any changes to the
PostScript graphics model; it was still designed around making marks
on paper, not for updating pixels on a computer screen.
?The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed
source, and the final triumph of open source. ? -Eric S. Raymond.
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