A lot of software can be disassembled or decompiled, but you generally lose variable names and comments (especially if the code has been intentionally obfuscate

A lot of software can be disassembled or decompiled, but you generally lose variable names and comments (especially if the code has been intentionally obfuscated). And generally the compiler that produced the code did optimizations which obscure the function of the code. Trying to decipher anything but trivial software from disassembled code is much more difficult than deciphering the code itself, which is often a non-trivial task on its own without good documentation. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disassembler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disassembler and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler