[antlr-interest] Language Refactoring??

yuvaraj_a_r yuva at excite.com
Wed Mar 5 02:19:18 PST 2003


Hello,
With the idea of refactoring showing up in other areas of software - 
we have code refactoring, data refactoring etc - I was wondering if 
we can think of Language Refactoring. 

Lets take an example. Assume I have a 4GL Language X which I want to 
transform to Java. However, I face the problem that X has been 
delivered to a whole load of customers and there is a HUGE amount of 
code written in X. So, I would like to provide a sequence 
of "computer language refactoring" steps to move from language X to 
Java. This would mean that there might be an intermediate stage where 
the language is not recognizable as X or Java but is essentially a 
mixture of the two.

Question : Is such a language transformation from one programming 
language to another possible by small reversible (refactoring) steps?

However the problem does not end there. Due to the fact that X has 
survived in the market for some years, supporting libraries and 
semantic constructs peculiar to X have evolved. 

Question : How to take the whole system from X based to Java based?

In this respect, I appreciate the MS .NET strategy of a CLR 
specification. Instead of fighting the problem after it hits us, the 
CLR strategy builds such transformation possibilities directly into 
the language definition....

So, what do you think?

Regards,
yuva




 

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