I got the idea from diotalevi. I don't remember his exact words, but he said Visual Basic might be what I'm looking for. On the other hand, he also told me never, ever to use Archive::Tar, and disappeared when I questioned him, leaving me and another monk confuddled in CB. He might have been being sarcastic both times. Reckless sarcasm --.

You said "(That's just a simplication, of course; decompilers need to be a bit more sophisticated to handle a command that maps to several lines of lower level code, for instance)"

Therein lies the major difference between a machine language interpreter and a machine language to high level language compiler. The former obviously must exist to run the program, but the latter is not necessary in programming, and is difficult to build.

This is basic stuff. I'm not going against common computer industry knowledge with this. Compiled programs for which there is no complete, free, well known decompiler are more safe from piracy.