2009/12/27 Thien-Thi Nguyen <[email protected]>: > As years go by, i have come to venerate old code per se less and > less.
Heh. As the years go by, I have come to venerate any code, old or new, less and less. It's always broken, and never actually does what you want, anyways. > I think it would be cool to write tools to distill the > essence of old code, recasting into new code. That is what > compilers do, after all... Dreaming, i'd like to see compilers > that go beyond: > > compilation > source ---------------------> "executable" representation > > to > > grok-db -----+<-------+ > v | > compilation | > source ---------------+----> "executable" representation > > where grok-db contains the analysis results of (this and other) > source, both present and past. Well, taking away two lessons from the recent past: -- "optimizing" compilers try to "grok" some small portion of the code, and re-arrange it in such a way that its more efficient. The challange is to "grok" ever-larger pieces. -- There are companies that specialize in taking :"legacy" code, written in strange old language dialects, and automatically modernizing/re-writing them to run on modern h/w. I don't really understand what the "old code" is, or exactly how much of the re-write process is automated, but its apparently a big business (i.e. big businesses that have lots of old code buy these things) I have a friend who works in this area, Jeff Wilkinson, perhaps he can comment. --linas
