• TechLich@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Yeah, I think you’re right but the phrasing is a little weird for that. It makes it sound like the optimiser lets you avoid having to do a “hex dump” which would be somehow “fattening” for the program causing it to have worse performance. Might be the marketing people not knowing what they’re talking about.

    Although we did do a lot of printing code on dot matrix printers back in the day, it would usually be the source code itself, this is a post-pass optimiser. It ran after the COBOL compiler had already turned the human readable code into object code. Although printing out the optimised hex might save on paper as a backup solution, it probably wouldn’t help with debugging.