Re: [TUHS] Disassemblers

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

Rob: "it was arcane but remarkably powerful"

Pretty much sums it up.  Wasn't your friend when you were a newbie, was
really your friend once you got to know it.

On Sat, Jun 19, 2021 at 06:55:07PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> Ah -- if it was adb you redid, no doubt of its power.  I used adb for a
> long time -- PDP-11/VAX/68K but as you said, you could learn a lot about
> your system.   FWIW:  we embedded adb into RTU, calling it kdb.   We didn't
> have no fancy VMs to run the system under, when it halted, it halted.   On
> a personal machine that was not a problem and adb/kdb was very cool.
> 
> Clem
> 
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2021 at 5:50 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Although upon reflection, I think what I did was fix 'adb' and call it
> > 'db'. Haven't had my coffee yet this morning.
> >
> > -rob
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 7:49 AM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> For v8 or thereabouts, I spent some time fixing some fundamental bugs in
> >> db and found that it was arcane but remarkably powerful. Since it was lower
> >> level, it avoided the endemic debugging problem of misleading you about
> >> your program: All it could do was tell you what the machine was doing.
> >> (Cdb, sdb, and adb were, at least in my experience, always lying to you.) I
> >> may be the only person who appreciated db fully. Once the bugs were gone
> >> you really could use it to good effect, as long as you understood the CPU.
> >>
> >> But it was buggy and arcane, no question about that.
> >>
> >> -rob
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 6:46 AM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> I remember compiling and playing Langston's "empire" that I was told
> >>> came from a decompiled executable. This was in the 4.2 days.
> >>>
> >>

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm