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| Authored by: PolR on Thursday, November 29 2012 @ 11:15 AM EST |
Not all debuggers are symbolic debuggers. The ability to inspect the internal
state doesn't depend on the debugging facilities provided by a compiler. These
facilities just make thing easier.
Besides, if the debugging facilities are left in, the software still infringe.
The patent reads on code which is can be inspected by your standard.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 29 2012 @ 11:58 AM EST |
>Couldn't it be reasonably argued that production code has removed the
debugging capabilities...
No. PoIR is right. In this context, debugging is merely the process of comparing
those mathematically (logically) calculated sign-vehicles to
referents--referents which some human thinks they should correspond to. It's ALL
about human thought!
So ALL debugging capabilities are in the human mind. And so long as there's a
human mind to interpret the bits as program instructions, debugging can occur.
Further, you can't possibly remove debugging "capabilities" from a
program. You can removing debugging "facilities". That is, you can
make it harder for that human to debug, but you cannot make it impossible.
Is this all theoretical smoke-blowing? Speaking as someone who has written
symbolic memory dumps for compilers, and has worked with people who WROTE the
"debuggers" on three different systems--I assure you that if necessary
another program can write whatever debugging facilities are needed can be
written.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 29 2012 @ 01:00 PM EST |
It's just that some of the automated aids to interpretation (debug symbols, etc)
have been put far away. Ever heard of "reverse engineering",
dissasembling, etc?
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 29 2012 @ 03:01 PM EST |
For those of us developers that can read Hex and understand binary - the
compiled state of software is still readable.
Just because you might not
be able to read and interpret compiled form - doesn't mean others can't.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 29 2012 @ 07:05 PM EST |
Programmers can recover a lot of that meaning just by looking at the compiled
binary code, even if there is no debugging info at all to make the process
easier.
I sometimes have to do that sort of thing in my day job as a game developer.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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