Re: Ada to C++ translator?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3A8C6843.B46006D6@lmco.com>, Robert Brantley says...
>Ted Dennison wrote:
>
>> Most likely you'll just end up
>> with the biggest mess the world has seen since my 3-year-old got into my
>> old wargame boxes.
>
>I got mine buried in the closet so they can't get at them.

That's what I thought too. :-(

>We are re-using code from a legacy system, and we have spent a lot of
>effort on binding this legacy Ada code to the RTOS we are using.  As the
>work
>has progressed it has become increasing apparent how much work is involved
>in mating the Ada code to the RTOS and the RTOS's development tools.  A
>great
>deal of complexity could be cut out if we move the application code to the
>RTOS
>native language or it's derivative C++.

Out of curiosity, what compiler and RTOS? Your Ada vendor ought to have bindings
to the OS provided with the compiler.

Even without them, C bindings are trivial to write, once you get the hang of it.
Its certianly far less effort than a language port! 

And I don't see how having a C++ port is that going to help you the next time
you port to a new system.  Odds are you are actually *better off* right now with
the Ada sources than you would have been with C++ sources. At least the Ada
language itself is portable. C++ can't even say that much. The C++ porting guide
for Mozilla forbids using quite a few *core* language features (templates,
static constructors, exceptions, namespaces, among others) due to portability
issues. You can see 
http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/portable-cpp.html for the whole list. If you *do*
port to C++, you'd do well to read and follow it. 

>The ideal was to see if we could automate the process of conversion as much
>as possible, we realize a 100%, or even 90%, mapping from one language to the
>other is impossible.

Good. You at least need to be somewhat realistic about what you are getting
yourself into. 

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