David,

I am generally in agreement with you regarding the quality of code
produced by translators.  Currently, people are using CMS-2 to Ada and
Jovial to Ada translators which take entirely dissimilar languages anbd
try to find some similarity between them.

I have seen truly hideous code from attempts to translate RPG to COBOL,
COBOL to Ada, and other academic exercises.  On the other hand, I recall
that the early Russian to English translators were also quite crude but
have improved greatly over the years since I first saw them.

Languages as similar as Ada and Pascal represent a different case. Although
it woiuld be difficult to redesign Pascal using good Ada style, direct
translation of procedures comes out rather well.  If one takes the result
of the translation and uses it for expediting the coding process in an
Ada design, the result can be quite reasonable.

Another, and potentially better approach, would be to leverage the Interfaces
Annex (ALRM Annex C) with a pacakge, Interfaces.Pascal and use the existing
Pascal code as is.

Richard Riehle


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