A re-engineering approach to program translation

A reengineering approach to program translation that helps to improve the quality of translated code is described. A detailed discussion of the major components of this approach is presented. The benefits of applying reengineering technologies to existing software systems are mainly from cost savings on reuse and maintenance. For example, reusing existing C codes in new Ada systems with minimal reimplementation or porting effort yields substantial cost savings. Applying reengineering tools to convert languages to Ada automatically has been beneficial. In addition, manually managing and analyzing a software system is very difficult due to the high complexity and large scale of software systems. The reengineering tool reduces the time spent on the labor-intensive task of code searching because it automatically identifies the software components and their dependency relationships. It then enforces good software engineering practices such as information hiding, localization, and abstraction in the new representation.<>