If a human can rewrite code from one language to do the same thing in another language, it's definitely possible to automate. But I acknowledge that translation will be very difficult to achieve. Saying something is impossible because it's very hard is ultimately self-limiting.
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Imagine testing this translation. You'd be up against some serious compsci maths and testing to prove the software is equivalent too. A nightmare to to debug. Just rewrite the code
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"Just rewrite the code," when the code you want rewritten was homebrewed by 20,000 different labs without the time or necessarily the expertise to rewrite it, is actually a much harder problem to solve than trying to solve the automation problem outright.
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Is there a constrained version of this problem for which it would seem more feasible to you?
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Rewriting the code is probably for the best even if you could translate it. It would force you to adopt more modern standards, tighten the spec, write good docs and comments.
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From a sociological standpoint, that suggestion is as idealistic and borderline impossible as my original suggestion =)
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It's been done often. In fact reimplementing code is pretty much the only way (I know of) to keep it alive. I have done it myself. Pretty much all CS undergrads do it.
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It's so a thing it has a Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_(programming) …
End of conversation
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I once had to hand-translate a few thousand lines of RPG* code to PL/1. That was hard enough. *No, the *other* RPG: Report Program Generator, a so-called 4GL
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