✘c2go

[Eric S. Raymond]

Gary E. Miller via devel <devel at ntpsec.org>:
> Maybe simple, maybe not,  Maybe someone with Go skills has a clue?

Go skills aren't going to help. Those error messages are quite revealing - they
hint strongly that the translation is done by running a buttload of regexp
transformations on the input source code.

I'm quite familar with the advantages and limitations of that technique; I
once wrote a crude C-to-Python translator implemented similarly.

     http://www.catb.org/esr/ctopy/

Knowing what I now do, I get why they dodn't document c2go and try to
finish it.  Bashing source code with regexps is easy, flexible,
comment-and-whitespace-preserving, and can get you 80% of the way
to translation. But the wall you hit at 80% is impenetrable. 

The problem is that the hard parts of language translation really need a
parser making an AST (Augmented Syntax Tree), then a transformation on the
AST generating a report in the target syntax. That's what you hit in the
last 15% - it's difficult to so and very difficult to integrate with
regexp-bashing.

The Go guys gave up.  They were almost certainly rightv to do so.
We should not expect c2go to be helpful.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

My work is funded by the Internet Civil Engineering Institute: https://icei.org
Please visit their site and donate: the civilization you save might be your own.


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