Can’t I just read the files to see the code?
In: 3
You are downloading the compiled executable file not the source.
It is a bit like the difference between getting a cooked meal and a recipe.
If you analyze the meal closely you can sort of tell what went into it and how you could make the same but that takes a lot of work.
If you use a spectrograph you might be able to guess what goes into the Colonel’s secret recipe, but that is not quite the same as getting the list of the ingredients out of the vault.
With computer code the stuff that people actually write is actually the human readable version. A special program called a compiler turns it into the computer readable version.
There are computer programs that can try to do the opposite thing and de-compile a binary executable into human readable code, but this doesn’t really work all that well most of the time.
For one thing all the comments (if there ever were any) get stripped out and all the variable names etc get lost and you end losing most of the context.
The result of a de-compiler is a piece of code that could be compiled into the same binary but it is not the code that was originally used to make it.
Some programs especially scripts are not compiled and just interpreted into computer instructions by an interpreter each time they are run. If you get a script like that you get both the program and the code behind it because it is the same.
Programmers may try to purposefully obfuscate their code and make their code hard to read, but that can be tricky.
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