No, I don't really misunderstand -- but perhaps you misunderstood my reply. Yes, it may include source or an optree, but that is not preventing some sort of encoding in the internal representation, as an attempt to prevent reverse engineering at some trivial level. I'm not the greatest of C hackers, though I am one of some regard, and I would have done something to make opcode (or source) extraction non-trivial. Many of these support some form of Crypt voodoo, as say the docs.