Multi-language systems

[sasaki@harvard.ARPA (Marty Sasaki)]

> I have had the distinctly unpleasant experience of trying to fix a DEC
> internal system which was written in OPS5, but fired up tasks written in
> 
> 	o	BASIC
> 	o	BLISS
> 	o	COBOL(!)
> 
> Anyone acting in the role of program doctor would have done what I did.
> I prescribed euthinasia.

Why can't systems be written in multiple languages? Why can't you just
plug in the "correct" language for a certain part of a system? Is the
problem just the data-representation problem? Or is it more deeply
involved? Maybe the paradigms are sufficiently different in each
language that no human could be expert enough to handle more than one
language?

This seems like a problem that AI could solve. Programs, like the
various "programming apprentice" systems could do the mapping from one
data-representation to another. The paradigms are difficult, but work
has been done here too, hasn't it? (I really don't know since my main
interest is more software engineering rather than AI.)

DEC has gone through a lot of trouble to provide good compilers for the
various languages, why can't we take advantage of it?
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Marty Sasaki				net:   sasaki@harvard.{arpa,uucp}
  Havard University Science Center	phone: 617-495-1270
  One Oxford Street
  Cambridge, MA 02138