Re: translator tools

chrisangus@my-deja.com wrote in message 99-10-092...
>I was wondering if anybody could give me any pointers on tools
>for translating from one language to another
>The target language is Java and the aim is to be able to edit it
>by hand after translation. ...
>[Translators are not very different from other compilers. Sometimes
>it intuitively seems that you could cheat in a translator and pass
>through expressions and the like without fully parsing and analyzing
>them, but that rarely turns out to be the case, due to subtle but
>important differences in things like operator precedence and type
>conversion rules. Making the output look nice is hard. See previous
>messages on the topic. -John]


John,


I do fully realize this. Apologies if I didnt really make myself
clear, I havent really hung round this newsgroup before.


What I looking for is a powerful abstract syntax tree manipulation
tool. which can do things like generic fold-unfold transfomation
(maybe a bit like TAMPR) I could write this myself but hoped there
might be something out there already.


I see getting the src language into an syntax tree and getting the
output language out again as the easy bit. Also the typing and
operator precidence is pretty much a knock off as used tools like
happy/yacc/lex etc before and am at home with declared and inferred
type systems. Also making it look nice is a no-brainer If formatting
is what you mean here.


My thinking is that if I go from language A to language B then I can
pretty much get a working system but what I want is to convert
language A idoms into language B idioms rather than having language B
code which is idiomatic of language A.


Since I cannot believe that no one has ever done work in this field
the pointers I'm looking for are pointers to research papers/projects
to do withe this area.


Chris

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