Source code?

This is a second part to my earlier question, see below for link.





I believe I already found the source code, and the extention info that i got from microsoft says it is written in C++, however in a text document format, it is still mostly just giberish, not to may words. and I can not find a c++ decompiler that will open it. any ideas? and just for a disclaimer, i am only trying to learn more about this, and not do anything that would fall under computer ethics.





http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Source code?
what you're talking about is called 'reverse engineering':


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_eng...





compiled programs have no reason to be read in text document format: they are compiled code not a scripting language, and reverse engineering compiled code takes an intense knowledge of the language the software was written in as well as probably assembly language too because the output you're going to get is not going to look anything even remotely readable to the average human or anything like the original source code.





ultimately you're trying to massively over simplify something that is not at all simple - machines do not interpret human language, they interpret machine code which is why compiling is necessary for fast efficient software - and in your three questions on this matter pretty much all the answers given are giving the same response and they're correct.





this link will explain that in more detail:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler
Reply:There is no such thing as C or C++ decompiler. Compilation of C/C++ into executables is a one-way process. To a large extent, that is bread and butter of software industry.





The best thing you get from binary .exe or .dll file is annotated assembler code.





Decent disassembler must be able to produce it ( like IDA Pro ), however you need to know machine code quite well to be able to understand it.