{Spam?} [ale] (reasonably) mature GUI solutions in Linux

Jason Day jasonday at worldnet.att.net
Tue Sep 16 15:35:44 EDT 2003


On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 01:44:41PM -0400, John Wells wrote:
> I'm not sure how it gets away with this internally...I assume that at the
> byte code level the reserved words are irrelevant...

Correct.  The reserved words are only reserved as far as the compiler is
concerned, they don't affect the bytecode.

> 
> Anyway, for relatively large projects, this is somewhat effective.  Of
> course, a programmer can still go through and figure out what's going on,
> but it'll make their life hell for awhile.

It depends on what your goals are.  This isn't really obfuscation, it's
just preventing people from recompiling your code.  If you want to
prevent people from *understanding* your code (e.g. discovering your
super-secret algorithm), changing variable names into reserved words
won't help.  Your best bet if you want to keep an algorithm secret is to
put it into a native method.

I've now forgotten what this thread was about to begin with :)
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9



More information about the Ale mailing list