Re: presentation softo [was: MSword reader]

[shimpei@example.com]

Stephen Turnbull wrote:
>     Shimpei> [1] On an even more tangential note, strings(1) is also
>     Shimpei> eminently useless for plucking strings out of compiled
>     Shimpei> Visual Basic executables--I guess it must be converting
>     Shimpei> everything to UTF-16 internally or something. This ruined
>     Shimpei> my plans to use RCS ident to keep tabs on a project last
>     Shimpei> year.
> 
> Hmm.  Now this sounds interesting.  Exactly what do we need here?

I think all that is needed is a doctored version of RCS for win32 that
can search an executable file for the UTF-16 representation of "$Id:".
I think. I tried hacking something up in perl along these lines, but that 
didn't work. strings(1) does uncover quite a bit of the internal symbols
used by VB--object names, file paths, and other garbage that should have
been stripped off at compile time but weren't--so I think what's happening
is that VB is converting any constant string occuring in the code section
(which is where I have to put the RCS strings) and clobbering them into
16-bit-ness at compile time.

In any case, I've given up on this in disgust long ago. Life is too short to
be wasted on Visual Basic internals hacking. [1]

Shimpei.

[1] But I still think a Linux desktop environment will need a VB interpreter
library to be a true Microsoft killer. [2] There are too many Melissa 
fodder^H^H^H Office documents floating around with macros in them.

[2] Of course, it isn't clear whether a Linux desktop environment *needs* to
be a Microsoft killer....