Re: Mumps to Python project

In article <OdNmj.5551$Rg1.4874@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Patrick Gallot  <pgallot@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Rod Dorman wrote:
>>  ...
>> The tricky bit comes from the side effects that modify the current
>> state. Consider all the ways that $TEST can be changed. Another 'fun'
>> one is ****d references.
>
>> Speaking from experience, "Here be dragons"  :-)
>
>Thank you for pointing out these two dragons. Other dragons that have 
>been pointed out to me include indirection and the VIEW command.
>After some research, I think I have ideas of how to get past them.

Don't spend too much time on VIEW or $VIEW(), they're too
implementation specific to be able to convert.

>However, I'd like to hear a bit more about your experiences; were you 
>involved in something similar to my project?

There was a MUMPS dialect called MIIS which (as the machines it would
run on were dieing) people needed to convert to Standard MUMPS. We
offered a code translation service to convert their MIIS code.

The intent was that they could convert with no impact to their
application users. Unfortunately the same couldn't be said about their
programming staff, sometimes the translated code got pretty ugly.

-- 
					-- Rod --
rodd(at)polylogics(dot)com