Re: Use byte-code directly?

[David Given <dg@...>]

On Friday 17 September 2004 17:36, George Warner wrote:
[...]
> The bad news is that we compact our cvs system on every GM release to only
> contain those releases (all the interim engineering builds are discarded).
> In that process my original .lua source file got discarded. Any way to get
> the source back? I'm sure the comments get stripped but if I could at least
> get something close to the original source back then I could fix some bugs
> I found and start merging some new code into the single source.

Wait --- you mean you actually discard all previous revisions out of your CVS 
repository? You can't just check out a version of the file from before you 
overwrote it?

I really hope I'm misunderstanding you, because that's completely braindead 
and your CVS admins badly, badly need to be beaten around the head until they 
promise never to do it again. Your CVS repository is *the* most valuable 
asset to any software company. Not only does it contain the current source 
code, it contains all the design decisions that led to that source code. You 
never know when you might need to refer back to it.

That said, if you really *have* lost it, writing a decompiler shouldn't be 
that hard. Unfortunately the byte code format isn't really public, so it 
would take a fair bit of rummaging around in the source to find the format... 
the main problem is that you may well have lost all your local variable names 
and scoping information. I can't point you at anything offhand, but if you 
were to write one, I'm sure people would be grateful...

(Any chance of getting the bytecode format formalised? Being able to generate 
and manipulate bytecode directly could be surprisingly useful. Source 
checkers, for example. Since the bytecode format is guaranteed correct, 
manipulating that rather than Lua source would be much simpler.)

> BTW: If you add goto/gosub to the language I'll never use it again.

How do you feel about COME FROM?

-- 
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|  dg@cowlark.com    | "I tried Zen once, but I understood it." ---
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