This paper applies reverse engineering on the Bresenham's line drawing algorithm [J. E. Bresenham, IBM System Journal, 4, 106–111 (1965)] for polygonal approximation of digital curve. The proposed method has a number of features, namely, it is sequential and runs in linear time, produces symmetric approximation from symmetric digital curve, is an automatic algorithm and the approximating polygon has the least non-zero approximation error as compared to other algorithms.