Ed Jaffe commented: >If such rewrite were viable, one could argue that all existing ISV product code would have already been rewritten in METAL or Dignus C, which it has not. New modules? Possibly. But, not existing ones.
Confirmed by academic studies. See (1) P.J.Middleton, "The Costs of Changing to a Fourth Generation Compiler Language", J. Programming Languages 2 (1994), pp.67-76. His conclusion was that changing programming languages should be avoided. (2) Andrey A. Terekhov, Chris Verhoef, "The Realities of Language Conversions", IEEE Software Nov.De 2000, pp. 111-124. I referenced both in my SHARE 103 talk "Extending the Life Cycle of Legacy Applications (With Added Thoughts Specific to Assembler Language)", New York, August 2004, session 8132. A copy is on the SHARE presentation archives.
