In which programming language?

  1. Richard Bastien

    People often ask the question: In which programming language is this program written?
    My question is: Is there a way to look at the binary file of an executable and see in which language that program was written? Any specific keywords at the beginning/end of the file?
    Did anyone has written a little application that can give the answer based on the contents of the first lines of an exe file?

    Posted: 2004-09-23 16:28:42.700367 #

  2. jason

    Clearly there is no way to do this in general for arbitrary source code that has been compiled into a binary executable. However, you might be able to determine whether the program uses some form of object-oriented language by looking at the binary, or perhaps some compilers insert their name and version into the binary. This is pretty unlikely though, unless you'd want it for debugging. I suspect the object file would contain the compiler version number.

    Hope that helps,

    --Jase

    Posted: 2004-09-24 19:56:32.918895 #

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