Re: Ada to C Translator

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <92fk1v0cou@drn.newsguy.com>,
  Mike K <Mike_member@newsguy.com> wrote:
> Question to the group:
>
> I have a requirment to convert and application written in ada to c.
> Can anyone provide me insight as to any ada to c translators
> available?

I believe Averstar has a service to do that, but you will have to
contact them directly.

If you try to do it yourself, its not a trivial task. C operates at a
much lower conceptual level than Ada, so you will have to write a large
amount of C code to emulate parts of the Ada runtime. Depending on what
OS you use, you could luck out and can get your OS to do some of the
work for you. But then it won't be as portable as the Ada version was.
Either way, you are in for a great deal of work. You will certinaly add
new bugs to the system when you write the new code, and you will quite
likely also mechanicly port all the system's existing bugs into C. Plus,
the end result will not be very C-like, which will make it a nightmare
to maintain.

Honestly, you'd be better off just writing the system from scratch
rather than trying to hand-port it.

All this expenditure could be justified if your platform doesn't have an
Ada compiler. Otherwise its just a plain silly thing to want to do. You
might as well take all your C code and rewrite it in Assembler while you
are at it.

I wonder if other walks of life have this problem... Do civil engineers
rip down a perfectly funtional and stable bridge and rebuild it with the
same carrying capcity using different materials? Do automobile owners
pay mechanics to take their cars completely apart and reassemble them
just becuse the orginial assemblers used different kinds of tools?

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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