Rewriting and Rearchitecting as Alternatives to Code Translation

摘要

The clock is ticking. The programmers who maintain your legacy mainframe and client-server applications are retiring - or will retire, as soon as they can recover from the damage done to their retirement portfolios in recent years. The person who was writing Powerbuilder 20 years ago, or COBOL 40 years ago, is going to leave. When they do, what will the owners of those systems do? The first option that many people consider when faced with software modernization is doing a wholesale, line-by-line translation of the legacy source code. Writing a translator is not that difficu technology such as abstract syntax trees and parser generators have been around for decades. The vendor who takes all your source code, clicks a button, and hands you back a new body of source code makes a tidy profit, and you get something back quickly that may compile and run correctly in your target environment.