Re: Generating C# from Java (Was: fit, nfit, et al?)

On Friday, August 8, 2003, at 04:01  AM, [email protected] wrote:

> Doing an automatic translation is an intriguing possibility, but
> I'd suggest doing it in two stages:
>
> 1. A conversion from Java to some kind of a parse tree
> 2. A language specific generator.

I would be interested in trying this but would not consider it 
successful unless the generated code in all languages were judged 
"readable" by practitioners who knew only the one language.

I suspect this is possible for a framework of limited scope, like fit, 
but impossible in general. Also, the product would have to be vanilla, 
which isn't bad, but isn't a limitation that we should accept without 
question.

 From the implementations done so far I know of three general areas of 
variation:

	1. naming restrictions
	(easy, just don't use troublesome names anywhere.)

	2. type specification and conversion
	(moderate, lots of solutions but not all feel right in every language.)

	3. object and inheritance models
	(moderate, how broad do we want to be? delphi is proving to be a 
stretch. do we do c?)

--
Ward Cunningham
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503-246-5587 f	http://c2.com