...for even further reading, the next step would be the classical Dragon book on compiler design...

Essentially, a compiler translates from one language into another — typically from a higher level language to a lower one, but there's no reason (in theory) it couldn't convert from Perl to C++ source. It's just that compilers are usually non-trivial to write, so no one may have done it yet...

In this particular case (as parsing Perl is a particularly non-trivial task), it would probably be a good idea to reuse existing code (such as the regular source of the Perl interpreter, or PPI) for the side of parsing and constructing a syntax tree.  You'd "just" :) have to add code generation for the target language from the syntax tree, paying particular attention on how to realize the highly dynamic facilities which Perl provides in a more "static" language like C/C++.

In reply to Re^3: Language Conversion by almut
in thread Language Conversion by Steve_BZ

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