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From: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.pascal,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C to Pascal Conversion (Was: Pascal to C Conversion)
Message-ID: <1489@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Date: 11 Feb 90 18:40:59 GMT
References: <52037@XAIT.Xerox.COM> <1990Feb2.172112.4509@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <3576@garth.UUCP> <4007@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <13785@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <6263@ncar.ucar.edu> <1990Feb10.231432.27149@utzoo.uucp>
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Reply-To: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
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In article <1990Feb10.231432.27149@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <6263@ncar.ucar.edu> hpoppe@bierstadt.scd.ucar.edu (Herb Poppe) writes:
>>How about the flip side of the coin? Does anyone know of C to Pascal
>>translators?
>
>I'd be very surprised to hear of any, since most C programs cannot be
>translated into Pascal in any simple way.  C's pointers, in particular,
>are far more powerful than Pascal's and there is no easy way to fake them.

Do you think so?  Perhaps you're talking about standard Pascal; Turbo Pascal
lets pointers be used almost as loosely as C does.  Certainly there's no
built in operator to increment one, but it would be very easy to write one:
 inc(longint(rec_ptr),sizeof(rec));
would come close if you didn't need to worry about crossing segment boundaries.

A bigger problem would be the growth in a program if it were translated.  
Assignments must all be done in separate statements in Pascal (unless you
define an assignment function), and Turbo Pascal doesn't support macros
the way C does, so they'd all have to be expanded before translation.

Of course, the biggest problem of all would be that the Pascal program would
end up just as unreadable as the C program it was translated from - even
Pascal can't make an ugly program pretty.

Duncan Murdoch