On 2/23/2014 11:37 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , charlie
writes:
[]
At the time, the only out we had in order to meet contract
requirements was to write a combination of assembly code, compiled
code, and horrors,
machine code. If that wasn't bad enough, we then had to "disassemble"
the machine code to see if there was a way to duplicate it at the
highest level possible, without writing compiler extensions.

What's machine code (as opposed to assembly code) in this context? How
did you write it?
Assembly code (source) is just that, and compiled or changed to machine
code at some point. "Dis-assembly" converts machine code back to
Assembly code. (When the assembler understands the code, which may not
always be the case)
Machine code may be "relocatable", or be tied to memory locations.
Machine code can be the output of the assembler or loader in some cases.

A more complete explanation can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code

The front panel on many of the old mainframes and minicomputers allowed
direct entry of machine code, and was usually used to manually enter
such things as a "bootstrap", or loader program.