reverse-engineering
Whether it's rebuilding a car engine or diagramming a sentence, people can learn about many things simply by taking them apart and putting them back together again. That, in a nutshell, is the concept behind reverse-engineering—breaking something down in order to understand it, build a copy or improve it. A process that was originally applied only to hardware, reverse-engineering is now applied to software, databases and even human DNA. Reverse-engineering is especially important with computer hardware and software. Programs are written in a language, say C++ or Java, that's understandable by other programmers. But to run on a computer, they have to be translated by another program, called a compiler, into the ones and zeros of machine language. Compiled code is incomprehensible to most programmers, but there are ways to convert machine code back to a more human-friendly format, including a software tool called a decompiler. Reverse-engineering is used for m...






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