Source-to-Source Translation and Software Engineering

Source-to-source translation of programs from one high level language to another has been shown to be an effective aid to programming in many cases. By the use of this approach, it is sometimes possible to produce software more cheaply and reliably. However, the full potential of this technique has not yet been realized. It is proposed to make sourceto-source translation more effective by the use of abstract languages, which are imperative languages with a simple syntax and semantics that facilitate their translation into many different languages. By the use of such abstract languages and by translating only often-used fragments of programs rather than whole programs, the need to avoid writing the same program or algorithm over and over again in different languages can be reduced. It is further proposed that programmers be encouraged to write often-used algorithms and program fragments in such abstract languages. Libraries of such abstract programs and program fragments can then be constructed, and programmers can be encouraged to make use of such libraries by translating their abstract programs into application languages and adding code to join things together when coding in various application languages. This approach can also improve program reliability, because it is only necessary to verify the abstract programs once instead of verifying them separately in each application language. Also, this approach makes it possible to generate code faster than programming from scratch each time. This approach is compared to the use of libraries and to other methods in current use for communication between programming languages and translation between languages.