[TUHS] UNIX Cyclical (Dis)assembly

[segaloco via TUHS]

Throughout the history of UNIX, various disassemblers have complemented
the assemblers and other development tools the system is known for.  In
Research V1, for instance, a PDP-11 disassembler is described as:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
NAME              das -- disassembler

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION       A PDP-11 disassembler exists. Contact the author for more
                  information.

FILES

SEE ALSO

DIAGNOSTICS

BUGS

OWNER             ken
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At the far other end, System V's SGS includes a "dis" disassembler,
which even makes it into the SVID as an optional feature of the software
development tools.  Nowadays, GNU binutils offers the objdump facility,
and Microsoft ships dumpbin with their compiler suite.  There are myriad
of other small disassembly and code analysis tools out there, but for
UNIX-like platforms and environments, there is what seems like a long
trend of the disassembler being a standard inclusion in development
tools, which I like.

Something I'd certainly like some input on though is this: At any point
was it expected of or otherwise designed into these disassemblers the
requirement that the resulting code be compatible with the assembler
for that same system?

In other words, for SGS, was there much expectation that you could take
what dis spits out and run it through as, getting a 1:1 product?  Or at
other times in the history of the system, was it commonplace to have
this level of ease in reproducing source code from a binary with
standard development tools?  The debugger comes to mind as another
utility often capable of reproducing assembly.

- Matt G.