my guess is no, but lets say you working on a program that you just installed in to the microcontroller and you lose the .c file from your computer. Is there a way you can recall it back to hex or more specifically .c language?

I also want to know because lest say you create a real nifty program that you want to be made secret and do not want anyone flashing off of your chip.

anyone ever thought of this or have any ideas on it?

You can read it off as a hex. If you had a disassembler, you could convert it to assembly.... Not to sure of C though. As to protection, a common way to protect your code from copying would be to set the protection fuse that prevents reading the chip or writing new code to it without a chip erase first.

Rick