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A decent analogy might be:

is it possible to recreate a running program from just it's source?

(lacking a compiler, development and production environments, and perhaps user inputs)

so my feeling is, not really, to an approximation

Sure it's possible. (I've recreated programs from source despite lacking the compiler, etc., originally used on it. The trick is to adapt something else to the task.) The source contains instructions on how it works, and those instructions can be used elsewhere.

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