Embed Source Code in EXE

[TDarcos]

On Discord, we were talking about various things (as usual -- all you guys are invited to join us there!), and the topic came up about how to retrieve the source code from the EXE. 

I have seen this before, it is a ...

What are some uses of this? I can think that you might want to compare the EXE source with other .bas sources to see maybe which the EXE came from? I doubt I guessed main use.

... self-extracting archive.

Back in the MSDOS/pre-Windows 3.1 days, i.e. the mid 1980s until the 1990s, someone got the idea of saving disk space - it was very expensive back then (I bought a large-capacity hard drive around then, and had to max out my credit card to afford the $401 (plus tax, call it another $20), and got a massive capacity 80 MB drive.) Well, then they started including other files in with applications to be distributed. Which brings up a chicken-and-egg problem, how do you unpack the archiving/unarchiving program when you don't have an unarchiver? So, there was invented the "self-extracting archive" unpacking stub program. It was attached to the front of the archive and the archive extension was changed to .exe. The stub code would unpack the archive into its component files.

"And everything old is new again."