A Refactoring Environment for Incremental Migration of Legacy Code

We propose the development of software technology for the interactive incremental conversion of legacy code to other languages. The goal is to make it cost-effective to migrate code from one language to another. The technology will allow a user to first transform the code to make it amenable to translation, then manage the semi-automatic translation to the new language, then finally allow the user to transform the translated code to allow it to be easily maintainable. We will base the implementation of this technology on The Synthesizer Generator?our own language-sensitive editor generating toolkit?and couple its strengths with Refactoring?a methodology for systematically transforming code to improve its design. The underlying machinery will be language independent, but in order to have focus in Phase I, and to capitalize on our own strengths and experience, we will concentrate on the translation of Ada to Java.