RE: Translators (Re: on mammals and dinosaurs) - Wasn't this originaly the Tabs & PetaWatts thread?

From: Campbell, Robert D (UK) <"Campbell,>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 18:40:34 +0000

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>> Doug mentioned to me he was thinking of a Fortran-to-CP translator,
>> ...
>> ... I have no idea how you can tell the Fortran-to-CP translator how to
>> translate COMMON and EQUIVALENCE. ...

I remember COMMON from ages ago. Basically it is too hard
to translate even from FORTRAN to FORTRAN. I had a program
(ok, Conway's LIFE patterns!) which worked with an Hewlet-Packard
FORTRAN 77 compiler which they replaced with a newer and better
one which broke the program. It optimised out some necessary
instructions - not a bug, but an ambiguity in the language.

>> Therefore the only approach that makes sense is to
>> re-engineer this kind
>> of legacy software, rather than translate it. This however
>> may be a very
>> politically incorrect idea.

Even reengineering may make no sense. Reverse engineering the
algorithm from spagetti GOTOs is MUCH harder than I'd imagined,
and when you've done it the result is impossible to adequately
test.

But yet some of those old FORTRAN codes still give good solutions
to hard problems, and so can't readily be binned.

There probably is no good general answer, politically correct
or otherwise.

R

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Received on Thu Feb 12 2004 - 19:40:34 UTC

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