With enough ingenuity the tricks in assembler can be automatically translated. I work for a company that converts legacy languages like COBOL and mainframe asse

With enough ingenuity the tricks in assembler can be automatically translated. I work for a company that converts legacy languages like COBOL and mainframe assembly language to Java or .net. The founder has a bunch of programs which analyze the code. In the case of mainframe assembly there are many weird tricks. Self modifying code or jumping into the middle of an instruction are common. There is even one program where the code jumps into a constant to cause an abend. The translation process works like a charm. My job is to get the translated output working in java and compare it to the original to make sure the translation works. A few things need to be tweaked by hand, but every once in a while we'll get a series of programs where the original coder uses the same tricks over and over again and a new rule has to be added to the translation tools. Some programmers used all kinds of odd tricks. I can tell when a program was written by the same person, just by the style of coding. It's a fun job.