Re: Commercial C To Ada 95 compiler

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Lots of times, we're confronted with problems for which there are only
butt-ugly solutions:

"I want to use this Ada compiler to develop all the new chunks of code for
this system & I don't want to be maintaining stuff in multiple languages, so
I've got to find a quick way of getting everything changed into Ada. If it
costs too much to convert, I'll just have to abandon the effort..."

I agree that a C-to-Ada translator is only going to produce horrendous code
and it is definitely not the way to go for things you want to keep around
for a while. Sometimes ugly solutions still have a time * place, though.
Sometimes its an attractive "Siren Song" to want to auto-translate & just
move forward. It just has to be done with the caveat that nothing produced
that way is going to be any good no matter what you do, so you don't want to
have to try to ever upgrade any auto-translated code. You'd just be
polishing a turd.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"SteveD" <nospam_steved94@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:GW1M8.123856$352.6037@sccrnsc02...
>
> It might make sense if you are planning to migrate a large C application
to
> Ada in a step-wise fashion.  Getting the application into Ada first and
then
> re-designing and coding subsets of the system incrementally allows such a
> migration that includes having a running system at each step of the
process.
>