(Re) Writing Code [2001]

fastcompany.com

7 pointsterpua4 comments

I thought it was funny in the story where they were talking about the company that had all this code locked in this old legacy language called HPS Seer or whatever, and wanted to upgrade it to something more modern with more programmers available.

And it was COBOL.

This article was only written in 2001. If it was written in 1985, maybe, I could see that making sense. And even that would be pushing it.

If you can get (or write) a lexer/parser to generate an AST from the code, can't you easily translate it to any other language?

The semantics may be very, very different. Let's take an example with two similar languages, Java and C++. You have the AST for a piece of code which creates a struct, zeroes its memory, calls a function pointer, then calls Qt library functions to display a GUI with a few signal/slots to handle user input. How does a program 'easily' translate this into Java?

Now, imagine a similar problem with Haskell, Prolog, Factor or 8-bit assembly...

The stuff he's talking about is mainly algorithmic e.g. pricing, the sort of stuff that you could easily write in vanilla code (e.g. no platform specific libraries).

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