Given a source to target mapping. How can you characterize the
difficulting difficulty of the translation?
- Is the set of all input fixed? If you have a fixed set of files to convert, your job is much easier because the set of language construct combinations is fixed. For example, building a general Pascal to Java translator is much harder than building a translator for a set of 50 existing Pascal files.
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- Jurgen Pfundt points out: The considered language might be small, but mapping is targeted for the conversion of huge files and this is really a challenge. An input file with a size of several megabytes restricts the usage of tree parsers or any other kind of memory consumpting consuming features. The transformation should be done in one single pass due to performance requirements and an extremly good and comfortable error reporting and error recovery is a must.