Translating binary executable file languages?

I think that the horse has left the barn in quest of grass that it doesn't have to chew. Cogent explanations, however grounded in practical sense and reality, appear to have not counted among the OP goals.

Hello again chase_daniel,

What is impossible is trying to make a connection between the binary executable and source language when using a high-level, object-oriented language.

As we have said repeatedly, the binary is the meaningful language to the computer. Those are the low-level instructions that the Central Processing Unit will execute. They are all just numbers. You can substitute some mnemonics for the instructions and parameters and then call it "assembly language". If you have many years of experience with assembly and low-level debugging for a particular CPU, then you might be able to make sense about of the raw binary. But that would still be at a very low level - branch to instruction if contents of register are zero, push value onto the stack, pop value from the stack, add two numbers and store result in register. And that's about it. That is what the binary means.

You are welcome to ask your question on Stack Overflow if you want. It might not be the experience you hope to find though. Instead of other people telling you that you are wrong, you will have other people deciding that your question simply isn't worth anyone's time and they will close it for you. Here in Apple Support Communities, this is your question and you can award helpful and/or solved points if you want. Apple moderators will, on rare occasions, edit or delete a post that violates the Apple Support Communities Terms of Use. But generally, you are in charge. On Stack Overflow, the community is in charge, not you.

Hello chase_daniel,

There is no such universal translation. Binary is just binary. Those encodings you mentioned are only for specific situations where binary codes that are normally not printable need to be converted into text for printout or transmission over a connection or communication protocol that accepts only text.

Do you have any knowledge of computer programming?

Are you after the source code (i.e. the lines the programmer wrote in a language like C++) which generates the executable? For that I think you would need a "decompiler" app.

Or are you just looking for the contents of some kind of text file which is in binary format?

Could you provide an example of the name of a file you want to decode?

Hi. Do you have a graduate degree in computer science? You'd need that to even begin to understand the answer to your question. The executable file is a mixture of coded instructions to the run-time loader, actual binary machine code instructions according to the processor's instruction set, and patches of initialized data. The text you see is some strings used by the program, messages, filenames, etc. If the program was written in a traditional language, like Fortran, it would be only pretty difficult to figure out. But if it's written in an object-oriented language, like Objective-C, it is essentially impossible, because the flow of control is so convoluted. Integration with shared libraries only adds to the fun.

Rereading your question, I'd like to emphasize that there is no text form of a binary executable file. The source code, in the form of programming language statements, was written by programmers, using many source files. These were compiled and assembled to produce binary machine code, which was then merged by the linker to produce the file you see. This is not some kind of binary obfuscation. It is the process of converting human-readable text to machine instructions that the processor can execute directly.

chase_daniel wrote:

I'm assuming it must ultimately be translated into binary so a computer can understand it. Wouldn't this be able to be translated back into some form of meaning?

The process of translating from programming language into executable is called compiling. Perhaps it would help if you looked into what that involves, via wikipedia or other sources. Translating back would be decompiling. Look that up in wikipedia as well. It is usually very difficult, except is special cases like a Java Virtual Machine.

I'd like to endorse etresoft's description. The computer is a relatively simple machine. It doesn't "understand" the binary instructions. It executes them. The bits in each instruction identify a particular command (LOAD, ADD, BRANCH, etc.), the flags to test/modify, the register to use, and the address and size of a memory data value. So, with some effort, you could interpret a program at that level, stepping along, keeping track of register and memory values, etc. But trying to tease meaning out of the millions of instructions in a given file would be humanly impossible.

On top of that, the flow of control (which instruction to execute next) of a modern object-oriented program is essentially inscrutable. The huge number of classes and methods (subroutines) mean that the program seems to jump around almost randomly. Shared libraries and system calls further complicate matters, since you'd need to decode the operating system resources along with the program being examined.

A long time ago, I was able to read binary code in the form of a hex dump printed by a lineprinter. But that was on the IBM 1130, a very simple computer with 32 K bytes of memory. It was a tedious process, and even then, the overall meaning was not really clear.

Viking, I applaud your turn of phrase. Just perfect.