what is the source code?

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What is the source code for a program? And why is it kept under secret, is it always part of the production version?

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10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Source code is the readable version of everything the program can do, when you open a program you prefer to see just the UI and click buttons instead of being able to stop at each line in a code and see more details about what is happening (As you can when you have source code and a debugger). Some programs can be reverse engineered and get the source code that way, although this is time consuming and involves a lot of expertise.

The reason it is kept secret is because of various reasons, these could be:
It contains the methods to keep sensitive data secure, such as passwords or encrypted personal information.
It makes you money, an antivirus company would go broke if anyone could remove the part of their software that locks it after a free trial.
Its not secret, its just not public, a lot of times something is not relevant enough to be put out there, there are markets so small there only 1 or 2 clients, these programs are usually just built by a single developer who never releases them.

TL:DR

Source code is the logic of a program, telling it what to do for everything a user may ever try to do (Or maybe not everything, thats what bugs are).
Its secret cause you make money off of selling the code instead of giving it away for free or it presents a security risk for private information such as texts & passwords

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