

(Re) Writing Code [2001] - terpua
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/45/faststart.html

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mkramlich
I thought it was funny in the story where they were talking about the company
that had all this code locked in this old legacy language called HPS Seer or
whatever, and wanted to upgrade it to something more modern with more
programmers available.

And it was _COBOL_.

This article was only written in 2001. If it was written in 1985, maybe, I
could see that making sense. And even that would be pushing it.

------
sdp
If you can get (or write) a lexer/parser to generate an AST from the code,
can't you easily translate it to any other language?

~~~
ramchip
The semantics may be very, very different. Let's take an example with two
similar languages, Java and C++. You have the AST for a piece of code which
creates a struct, zeroes its memory, calls a function pointer, then calls Qt
library functions to display a GUI with a few signal/slots to handle user
input. How does a program 'easily' translate this into Java?

Now, imagine a similar problem with Haskell, Prolog, Factor or 8-bit
assembly...

~~~
gaius
The stuff he's talking about is mainly algorithmic e.g. pricing, the sort of
stuff that you could easily write in vanilla code (e.g. no platform specific
libraries).

