Re: "RESET"

On 2025-06-05 09:42, David Brown wrote:

On 04/06/2025 20:54, Joe Gwinn wrote:

On Wed, 4 Jun 2025 17:53:19 +0200, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

...

I can see AI being a help here - just as many existing tools can be
helpful for figuring out what old code does.  I am not holding my breath
waiting for AI to manage such conversions on its own.

>
Nor is MS - the new code is written by humans.
>
Although MS is trying automatic translation into modern languages, I
gather that it doesn't work all that well.  In my world, there was a
lot of talk of building automatic converters to translate from one
computer language to another.  It never worked because no machine
could understand the inventive ways people on tiny machines used
bespoke memory structures to improve performance.
>

 Automatic translation between programming languages is unlikely to be successful unless the languages have very similar structures (say, Pascal to C) or you are using the output just as an intermediary language for compilation rather than as a new version of the program (like using cfront for C++ to C transcompilation).  Good code written in one language is going to be structured differently from good code written in a different programming language.  And these old code bases might have started as a "good code" at one time - they are very unlikely to have remained so over decades of fiddling, fixing and expanding.

Long ago I worked with an early version of LabWindows for MsDOS (around 1995). You could create the program in Basic or C, and it could be translated back to the other language automatically. Specially in C the set was limited, though. Using the internal editor it worked.
--
Cheers, Carlos.