At 11:20 PM 12/21/95 -0800, you wrote: difficult for the amateur attacker.
A tale I hear is that when HP had to deliver operating system source to the french government they stripped all comments and changed all variable and subroutine names to 32 byte strings of I 1 0 (zero) and O (uppercase O). It still compiled but was 100% useless to human readers.
There is a commercial product out there from Gimpel Software called _The C Shroud_. It removes all structure from the code, replacing it with gotos, renames all the symbols to axxxxxxx, converts constants and strings to hex, substitutes all #defines and expands all macros, strips all formatting and comments, etc., resulting in a perfectly compilable, but infuriatingly obfuscated set of source files. Steven Weller
On the other hand, there are some programmers out there whose work product makes such a product totally redundant!