Re: Ada to C Translator

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

If you're translating the Ada to C++ so that it can now be maintained by garden
variety C++ programmers, then I'd suggest you'd absolutely want to avoid a
machine translation. The time the programmers will spend trying to figure out
the translated code will be way more than the time it would take them to learn
Ada. You'd be better off declaring the system "Finished" and start working on
the "Version II" of it in whatever language makes the most sense. A human
translation would likely take about as long as a redesign and a redesign allows
you to fix anything you didn't like about the original system. The economics of
any other choice aren't likely to be good.

Of course, if you'd like to outsource the job, I'm sure we could talk about
it...

MDC


Dave Ptacek wrote:

> Not that Ada is the limiting factor in all of this, but most new college
> grads will have a C/C++ background and realize that Windows programming in
> C/C++ looks pretty good on a resume.  Throw in the integrated programming
> environment (Visual Studio) and several educational houses providing
> immediate Windows training programs (Learning Tree), the idea of porting the
> source code from Ada to C/C++ becomes an attractive option.  Is it
> technically the best design choice?  For this particular application
> mentioned above, probably due to the OS choice and development toolsets
> available, but I certainly wouldn't make a general statement that it's the
> best choice for every situation.

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