Re^2: Mission critial code required: I have some code in BASIC and require it to be translated to perl

Don't use automated translators for mission-critical code. Hire someone to translate it for you. If it's mission-critical, it's worth something to someone, right? Well, make them prove it.

I don't know. If you have a lot of source code in Foo then it can be more time efficient and less error prone to re-implement a Foo compiler that targets something else than it is to translate all the code by hand.

I once had to help shift a fair sized app (about 20KLOC) from some old PDP-11 hardware that was implemented in a home grown bastard offspring of Lisp and Prolog. Rather that translate the code we just re-implemented the language in Common Lisp. I guarantee that doing a manual translation of the code would have taken a heck of a lot longer, and probably introduced a bunch of errors into working code.

Comment on Re^2: Mission critial code required: I have some code in BASIC and require it to be translated to perl

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Re: Re^2: Mission critial code required: I have some code in BASIC and require it to be translated to perl by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Apr 24, 2004 at 01:02 UTC
That is one option. I tend to prefer, after a few times doing this, to rewrite the app. The number of improvements and bugs fixed tend to outweigh the number of errors. Granted, I have only worked with relatively young apps and rewriting them after they were implemented by junior developers. shrugs YMMV, as with everything. ------ We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age. Then there are Damian modules.... sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon.* - flyingmoose	[reply]
Re^4: Mission critial code required: I have some code in BASIC and require it to be translated to perl by adrianh (Chancellor) on Apr 24, 2004 at 16:44 UTC
That is one option. I tend to prefer, after a few times doing this, to rewrite the app. The number of improvements and bugs fixed tend to outweigh the number of errors. If you have buggy code that nobody understands then translation may be a better option. In my case my clients were perfectly happy with their little language and the quality of their codebase. They were not happy with their PDP-11s - which were getting more expensive to maintain every year. So building a new compiler for a new box was the obvious decision. For all I know they're still tweaking their little expert system now. If we'd gone the translation route then not only would the development time have been longer, the client would have also had to retrain their internal people to use a new language. Also 20KLOC isn't really that much. When you have organisations with hundreds of programmer years invested in their code you know why they prefer to take compiler development in-house rather than manually convert everything to whatever the current language-of-choice is :-) The number of improvements and bugs fixed tend to outweigh the number of errors. Granted, I have only worked with relatively young apps and rewriting them after they were implemented by junior developers. shrugs YMMV, as with everything Indeed. Sometimes moving to another language is exactly the right thing to do. Context is everything.	[reply]