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<span id="openzim-page-title" class="mw-page-title-main"><span class="mw-page-title-main">Derivative code</span></span>
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</style><div role="note" class="hatnote navigation-not-searchable">Not to be confused with <a href="Derivative_work" title="Derivative work">Derivative work</a> or <a href="Automatic_differentiation" title="Automatic differentiation">Automatic differentiation</a>.</div>
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<p>
<b>Derivative code</b> or Chameleon code is <a href="Source_code" title="Source code">source code</a> which has been derived entirely from one or more other machine readable file formats. If <a href="Recursive_transcompiling" class="mw-redirect" title="Recursive transcompiling">recursive transcompiling</a> is used in the <a href="Software_development" title="Software development">development</a> process, some code will survive all the way through the pipeline from beginning to end, and then back to the beginning again.
</p><p>This code is, by definition, derivative code. The following procedure can be used to easily test if any source code is derivative code or not.
</p>
<ol><li>Delete the code in question</li>
<li><a href="Software_build" title="Software build">Build</a> (or compile) the project</li></ol>
<p>If the build process simply replaces the source code which has been deleted, it is (obviously) code which has been derived from something else and is therefore, by definition, derivative code.
</p><p>If the build process fails, and a human needs to re-create the deleted code by hand, this is again, by definition, <a href="Hand_coding" title="Hand coding">hand code</a>.
</p><p>The <a href="Transcompiler" class="mw-redirect" title="Transcompiler">transcompilers</a> and other tools which create derivative code, are usually themselves either in part, or entirely hand code.
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<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="References">References</h2></div>
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This article is issued from <a class="external text" title="Last edited on 2025-05-03" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?title=Derivative_code&oldid=1288597866">Wikipedia</a>. The text is available under <a class="external text" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en">Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0</a> unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.
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