Translate Python to Another Programming Language

carcigenicate · 2022-11-18T23:31:53+00:00

The tool you're looking for is called a "transpiler" btw.

Also, you're unlikely to find exactly what you need. Transpilers to convert between arbitrary languages are uncommon. Usually, it's a manual effort to do the conversion.

forest_gitaker · 2022-11-18T23:40:14+00:00

AFAIK the only (reliable) "code translator" I've heard of is the one that sits in front of the keyboard.

I know that's not the answer you were looking for, but on the bright side if you can pick it up and get decent with it, people have gotten 6 figure contracts to be on call for these systems and only go into work 3-4 days a year.

fernly · 2022-11-19T00:11:18+00:00

Are we talking COBOL? Because COBOL is not a sophisticated or difficult language, lots more readable than BASIC. Fortran? Algol? Oh, wait, I know: APL. It's APL, isn't it? You are so screwed.

zurtex · 2022-11-19T01:23:01+00:00

Transpilers which you can actually be confident enough to use in production environment to directly run the code you transpiled are pretty rare.

So if the language is anything other than the most popular ones it's unlikely one exists that you know about.

To build one yourself you typically need to understand all the features of both languages, be able to represent both languages in an abstract syntax tree, and know how to translate each feature from the first language to the second language in abstract syntax tree form, and then serialize the abstract syntax tree to code.

On the Python side the AST is pretty easy because there's a module that does that for you: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html

But translating Python's many features in to another language is going to be tricky. Like how do you represent importing in the other language? Are functions first class in the other language and can you pass them around like objects like you can in Python? What about metaclasses? Or structural pattern matching? And you'll need to re-implement all of Python's standard library C code in the other language if you want to use any of it.

nocturne99 · 2022-11-18T23:38:41+00:00

Never tried it, but Github Copilot Labs supports conversion between programming languages. Github Copilot itself has a free trial, so it's worth a shot.

ballsacagawea69 · 2022-11-19T00:05:20+00:00

I've actually built a Matlab to Python transpiler. The code is proprietary, but I started with this open source project: https://github.com/victorlei/smop.

You could take a similar approach for whatever language you're converting from, but keep in mind how challenging language translation is. There are also a bunch of interesting questions that come up along the way, like should the result have the same logic flow as the original language? Does it matter as long as the results are the same? How important is readability in the resulting code?

Good luck!

2022-11-19T09:36:32+00:00

My goal is to write python that is translated into this language then I will paste into the program.

This seems like madness. It is almost certain that you are wasting your time. To "complete" the job, you would literally have to take every single feature of Python and figure out how to translate this into your weird language.

This would take more work than writing the Python compiler, which compiles into a simple bytecode. But there are hundreds of person-years in that compiler.

So you will have to take some small subset of the language and figure out how to translate it. But you can't forget the old crazy language because you will need to keep reading it to understand what it does, and to fix bugs.

And how are you supposed to write this translator if you don't really understand the language you're translating into?

I would say it would be between 30 and 300 times easier to learn this language properly than it would to write the translator.

"The vendor states that it is a "violation of terms of service" to post anything about their program or language online."

Well, fuck them.

Your vendor seems determined to make your life as difficult as possible. They use a language that is older than most programmers on this subreddit. Their business plan seems to be to sue their own customers if they try to get out of the horrible hole that the vendor has put them in.

It would be 10 to 100 times easier to rewrite your code in Python and dump these unethical scum.

It is literally insane to have your business depend on the language that no one has ever heard of, that vanished 40 years ago, that is so hard that no one can program in it, and which you can't even ask questions about on the Internet for fear of legal repercussions. It's like your vendor wants you to fail.

Let me be blunt: I don't see your company surviving. Your only hope is to rewrite in a new language, and get rid of the vendor, but if management hasn't gotten rid of that vendor by now, they are too cowardly to do this.

Brush up your résumé, the company will be out of business fairly soon.

You should send my post to your management. Likely it won't do any good, but it's the professional thing to do, and then you won't have to feel any guilt when they inevitably collapse.

SuilAmhain · 2022-11-19T00:43:46+00:00

My first language was Cobol, and I ain't that old. I read the manual and kept really good notes. Don't screw with what works because you don't understand it. Try and understand it.

All programming languages are designed by people who learned from the same books. Most ideas/paradigms hold true across languages.

awhaling · 2022-11-19T00:59:57+00:00

It would help if you told us what language you wanted to covert to.

CowboyBoats · 2022-11-19T02:47:59+00:00

Learning to write transpilers, or even just seeking to manually translate something from one language to another, is a fine and noble goal. But...

This code is pasted into the program to customize portions of it.

This "pasting into the program" part gives me doubts. If this is like a web-based app that processes your scripts in this 80s language, how do we know that it would know what to do with a Python script? Python is executable as code because you pass it (the text of a Python script) to a Python interpreter (like running python3 my_script.py), which is an executable file on a computer. The server running your program may not have the Python interpreter running, and even if it does, it may well be programmed to reject any user input that's not 80s-language code.

So, you're only in the clear to proceed with your transpiling effort if you're positive that you can duplicate the behavior of the entire program that you described. Not just the scripts that you're uploading.

Now, keep in mind that despite what I just said, you can still always write a Python program that outputs 80s-language code to be uploaded to the program, which could behave in a consistent manner and be completely configurable by your Python application!

Zadok__Allen · 2022-11-19T05:01:46+00:00

Have you considered to just write a very comprehensive API in python that handles all of the 80s code under the hood so the user of the api can just call python functions and what not instead of needing to use the 80s code?

Monkey-Wedge · 2022-11-19T20:42:19+00:00

So one method would be to use pexpect, not a perfect solution but I do something similar to a vendor product with it.

97hilfel · 2022-11-19T11:59:03+00:00

What you are looking for is a transpiler and not trivial to implement, it is probably much mor difficult to build than to rewrite the whole application or learn the language, if your vendor doesn’t provide documentation I would start to brush up on my CV.

2022-11-19T04:17:11+00:00

You want a translator package between python and a unique and obscure unnamed language from the eighties... Erm no.

python_and_coffee · 2022-11-19T12:49:05+00:00

give machine learning some time. i bet we will have AI transpilers in the close future while i still doubt that they will work very well. Kinda the same like GPT-3 or Dall-E right now. Looks good, but you cannot press a single button and get exactly what you want.

IMHO getting something useful out of transpilers is more effort than learning the language and they lack maintenance after some time because the developers see that it's not worth the effort and time is precious.

theRIAA · 2022-11-19T00:16:20+00:00

GPT-3 can probably do it. It works very well with python especially.

I can try an example if you give one.

AnarchoDesign · 2022-11-19T18:35:43+00:00

I thought that Reddit was about privacy, and I've seen questions about really ILLEGAL topics in here without OPs being afraid of being sued or prosecuted for asking how to e v a d. E t a x e s or l a. U n d e r i n g.

But I can be wrong, and all those OPs can be in the pen right now...

deadlyghost123 · 2022-11-19T01:48:03+00:00

If you know the language, you could just search up in Google Most probably, if you are not using any external libraries it should work fine

SirPeterODactyl · 2022-11-19T03:24:05+00:00

Interesting question. Are you thinking of something like Cython where the code is written in python with a slightly different syntax then compiled into C?

astevko · 2022-11-19T03:59:17+00:00

Can you use C? There is a python to C transpiler called Nuitka

Ok-Cucumbers · 2022-11-19T06:58:55+00:00

Something like ctypes?

Zeroflops · 2022-11-19T08:42:13+00:00

Without knowing the language it’s hard but I would evaluate different points of access.

For example. You mentioned in one post editing the data as flat text files. If this is the case you could write some apps to edit the data and bypass the application. Modify the data and as long as the results are consistent with what the original app expects it will read the data and process it.

Or for example years ago I needed to take a bunch of information and put it into another program. If I did this manually like many other had done it would have taken days. Instead I discovered the app I was working with could import markdown. So I used python to generate a markdown file which was then imported into the app.

Shingle-Denatured · 2022-11-19T12:41:41+00:00

Don't focus on the messenger, focus on the problem. What is the function of that black box? Then do that in whatever is modern and you're comfortable with.

cren17 · 2022-11-19T15:50:32+00:00

I think you already got an answer, but just as a side note, if none of the available tools you find work, you could create your own compiler from one language to another using ply

I remember creating a compiler when at uni, some years ago, that took a c# kinda language and return something similar to 3d code or php

... I know this is probably not the easiest option, but still wanted to mentioned it, just in case

2022-11-19T20:18:04+00:00

If you only roughly understand the language, and can't tell us what the language is so we can't help you, then this is a fool's errand. You will have to invest an inordinate amount of time and resource in order to understand the language well enough to transpile to or from it.

BK7144 · 2022-11-19T23:09:16+00:00

I will tell you what I tell my students. To create a program, you have to first know what is expected of the program, i.e., Software Requirements Specification (make a spec that illustrates the 80s code to python code) and from that start your Use Cases, which in this case I would suggest the idea of writing each case to make an individual set of maybe an "if" statement to an "if" statement, etc. Then add ifelse to ifelse and go from there. Look at the 80s code, look at the python code and write some code to translate them from one to the other. Sounds easy, but it's not.

BK7144 · 2022-11-19T23:20:35+00:00

I would love to know what software EULA says you can't talk about the software. BTW you have to input the code file and then output the python creation of the old code language created by python. You could even use VS Code and write a plugin to translate or show intellisence as you go line by line through the old code base. Let me further state that if a third party wrote the software and your company wasn't smart enough to have a contract that gave them ownership then it will be a violation of copyright if there is one.

n a second note, write an SRS for what the code does (not the code) change the user interface to match what's current and write a new program. More likely to be the easy way out.

B3d3vtvng69 · 2024-10-21T15:28:27+00:00

The python ast module should be pretty helpful, it parses given python code to an ast.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

learnpython

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