The Realities of Language Conversions

N o v e m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 0 I E E E S O F T W A R E 111 As the term name magic indicates, you don’t need proof to support your claims. Anyone desperate for solutions will wholeheartedly accept those unsupported claims.1 In fact, many software industry decisionmakers find themselves trapped in huge amounts of legacy code, in dire need of modification. At the same time, software engineering educators deliver people skilled in contemporary development rather than enhancement programming, let alone geriatric care for aging legacy applications. Capers Jones2 even thinks that this phenomenon is one of the 60 most important risks in software engineering. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that a language converter could solve your personnel problems: a language conversion is supposed to bridge the gap between available knowledge of people and the knowledge needed to solve legacy problems. Is it that easy? This article sheds light on the realities of language conversions; it also provides simple examples that expose the problems—anyone involved in software engineering can understand them.