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Conference turris::languages

Title:Languages
Notice:Speaking In Tongues
Moderator:TLE::TOKLAS::FELDMAN
Created:Sat Jan 25 1986
Last Modified:Wed May 21 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:394
Total number of notes:2683

344.0. "Converting CORAL-66 to Ada" by MINNIE::SINGLETON () Tue Sep 29 1992 09:31

I am currently advising a customer who is writing a justification 
for migrating a PDP application to some form of VAX solution.

I'd be very grateful for some help as follows :

1) Has anyone got any rough figures on how many man-months or whatever
would be involved in converting about 33,000 lines of CORAL-66 code
to Ada ASSUMING no extra functionality is required ?

2) Are there any 'automated code conversion packages' for CORAL-66 to Ada ?

Thanks in advance for any information,

Jan Singleton

X-posted in ADA and LANGUAGES conferences
T.RTitleUserPersonal
Name
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344.1Might be hard...ULTRA::WRAYJohn Wray, Secure Systems DevelopmentTue Sep 29 1992 10:4617
>1) Has anyone got any rough figures on how many man-months or whatever
>would be involved in converting about 33,000 lines of CORAL-66 code
>to Ada ASSUMING no extra functionality is required ?
    
    Depends very much on the sytyle of Coral-66 programming.  Coral-66
    deliberately encourages the programmer to use pointer arithmetic all
    over the place.  It can be even worse than C, as the language
    definition includes details on the relationship between the addresses
    of different stack-based variables within a given stack frame.  If the
    code you're looking to port makes use of features like this, it's going
    to be a tough job.
    
    We used to market a Coral-66 compiler for VMS.  That'd probably be a
    better solution that trying to re-write a large Coral-66 system in any
    other language.
    
    John
344.2COUNT0::WELSHIf you don't like change, teach LatinWed Sep 30 1992 03:5015
	There are other CORAL 66 compilers for VMS - Systems Designers
	used to have one, and even now as EDS-SCICON they would be worth
	asking.

	Generally, to translate from a less rich language like CORAL 66
	or FORTRAN to Ada is a bad idea in principle, because you are
	bound to get "Adatran" - no translator is going to be smart enough
	to create Ada packages, tasks, etc. out of thin air. So you will
	end up using the "CORAL 66 subset" of Ada, and you wouldn't be
	a whole lot better off.

	The "right" thing to do is to reimplement using Ada as a design
	language. Then the application will gain in maintainability.

	/Tom