Re: Let's cover this one more time...

[mjmeie@ss3.magec.com (Michael J. Meier)]

: Marin David Condic (CONDICMA@PWFL.COM) writes:

: It's more of a personal bias - I don't believe that an automated
: translation of "legacy" code from *any* language to *any other*
: language is ever going to be done well. By this, I mean you will
: end up with code that is not very intelligible or will use obscure
: language constructs to insure correct translation and in general
: will be more difficult to work with than the original system.
: (Ever wonder why people generally don't want to mess with the
: assembler output of a compiler?)

: Throw on top of it that we are talking about a fairly old and
: really large body of FORTRAN code to be translated. Sight unseen,
: most of us would out-of-hand admit that we can do a better job of
: "engineering" a system today than was originally done back in the
: mid-70's. Sight seen - I can asure you this is the case.

: I'd prefer to make the case that it would be more cost effective
: (say, over five years) to reengineer the system from the ground
: up than it would be to auto-translate it and spend forever
: patching the code until it works.

I had a similar experience with some ancient FORTRAN code a few years back
when I was working on a C program.  Of course, we wanted to convert to C
instead of Ada, but the principle's the same.  We found it beneficial to
first apply a Fortran de-spaghetti-fier (or something like that) to turn the
awful Fortran code into somewhat structured Fortran code.  This at least
made the code a bit more understandable.  We were then able to figure out
the code and make the manual conversion with some confidence that the result
would be close to the original.  We chose this approach despite the fact that
line-by-line Fortran-to-C converters exist for the same reasons that you seem
to be expressing: understandability -> long-term cost effectiveness!

I believe that several companies offer a Fortran de-spaghetti-fier, but the
one that springs to mind had a name something like "Cobalt 4".

Mike Meier
meier@magec.com