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From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Legislative Mandate for Ada; mindless translations
Message-ID: <2467@sparko.gwu.edu>
Date: 17 Dec 90 22:13:57 GMT
References: <2449@sparko.gwu.edu> <9700@as0c.sei.cmu.edu> <2455@sparko.gwu.edu> <2585@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Reply-To: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu ()
Organization: The George Washington University, Washington D.C.
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Referring to Charlie Sampson's note on translations:

Of course the computing business has seen this translation stuff before.
I hope nobody would seriously consider just mechanically translating
Cobol to Ada for the hell of it. Would you all agree that unless a
system needs _serious_ revision, we shouldn't fix what ain't broke?

Given pragma INTERFACE and some reasonable way to call Ada programs from
another language (I know, it's not easy as things stand now), it seems to
me that even a multi-language system is better than either perpetuating
old languages just for module-to-module compatibility or mindlessly
translating badly-written Cobol into badly-written Ada. Who agrees ?
Is there any consensus on this out there (after all, I'm stuck in the
Ivory Tower :-))?

Mike Feldman