tkueny@nfsun.UUCP (Todd Kueny) (02/27/91)
Several years ago I founded a company called LEXEME which did
language translations from a variety of computer languages to
both C and Ada. The company did okay but died for reasons unrelated
to the technology. The technology was very effective. For example:
There is an AN/UGC-144 terminal in Saudi Arabia running Ada which
we created. We probably converted several million lines of code
over the course of 4 or 5 years; much is still in production.
Is this still a viable business area? Are companies willing to
consider translation as a viable business alternative?
It seems that there is a lot of interest in Ada these days as well as
in translations. It is interesting to note that there are a lot of
'translators' available which claim to convert FORTRAN and so forth to
C or Ada very easily. These are often low in price.
I still believe that hard part of translation is not really the
conversion part, i.e., compiler-like technology can do everything
which is reasonably possible, but is instead the project planning and
execution. The more difficult parts are moving the run-time, making
sure the Ada compiler does what you want, making sure task switches
happen fast, making sure that the source get frozen, knowing how to
test, etc.
I would like to hear any comments concerning translation that people
may have. Only serious comments please, no flames about why its a
terrible thing to do; some of us have no choice.
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Todd R. Kueny { My opinions are my own. }
nfsun!tkueny@uunet.uu.net 105 Bevington Road
(412) 243-1630 Pittsburgh, PA 15221
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Todd R. Kueny Intelligent Technology
nfsun!tkueny@uunet.uu.net 115 Evergreen Heights Drive
(412) 931-7600 Pittsburgh, PA 15219jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) (03/01/91)
The problem is not translating a bad design in FORTRAN into a bad
design in Ada--I'm sure that can be automated.
The question is--is there any way to automate the translation of
a bad design in FORTRAN into a good design in Ada? I doubt it.
--
***** DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed herein are my own. Duh. Like you'd
ever be able to find a company (or, for that matter, very many people) with
opinions like mine.
-- "When I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you."