[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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