Does someone knows if some kind of translation process has been done ?
(even for an ad-hoc / single application conversion)

On Apr 30, 6:09 pm, Davide Grandi wrote:
Does someone knows if some kind of translation process has been done ?
(even for an ad-hoc / single application conversion)

Source to source translation is one option, but you might get similar
results by running Java inside a Smalltalk virtual machine (a bytecode
to bytecode translator). There is a thread in this group about people
interested in the opposite (Smalltalk on the JVM, which has actually
been done a few times). In the mid 1990s, there was a project that ran
Java on the Self virtual machine (I consider Self to be a Smalltalk)
and the results were good enough that Sun decided to buy Animorphics
and develop the Java Hotspot VM. See a description of Pep in:

http://www.merlintec.com/vmworkshop99/sub.pdf

-- Jecel
Thank-you very much for the pointer (and on level up there are some

Taking a working Java application and converting it into Smalltalk ?

Recently I wrote Java to Tcl and Java to Python source code
transformations (see http://macroexpand.org/doku.php/txl:projects:start)
with TXL (www.txl.ca). You can easily try them, there are binaries for
Win and Lin platforms.

sounds interesting

I can say that it is not difficult in general to write a language
transformation Java->Smalltalk (e.g. I could write it rather fast
reusing e.g. java2tcl). The problem is with Java class library. I.e. a
tool can easily translate SomeJavaClass.MethodCall(arg1, arg2) to the
corresponding Smalltalk construction. But one will need to have an
implementation for that.

So a tool converting
Java to Smalltak would also have to recognize certain Java patterns and
"transpose" them to Smalltalk code.