jima@hplsla.HP.COM ( Jim Adcock) (07/29/88)
I have an Objective-C to C++ "translation aid" that I'm willing to make available on an "unsupported public domain" basis to strongly motivated users. The translator reduces by maybe a factor of 10X the amount of time required to translate software from Objective-C to C++. Unlike some language translators, this one chooses not to do a flawless job of translating, but rather emphasizes not messing up the original naming conventions, indentations, and commenting schemes. This leaves some final manual clean up work to the user. On the positive side, the resulting code looks like real code, not some kind of gibberish. The potential user should have a fair chunk of code that needs to be translated -- say more than 10 classes, should be quite knowledgable in C++ and Objective-C, and should have some idea of the difficulties and limitations involved in language translation. The translator is implemented in K+R C code which should be relatively portable, but may take a day or two's work to get running on a new machine. Finally, the potential user should realize that using the translator is not going to be a very useful way to compare the relative merits of Objective-C and C++. This tool is not flawless, but has proven to be useful to some people.