LANguage Conversion Engine (LANCE)

From 1987-1997, DoD required Ada for every software project where new code generation was more than 30% of the effort. With the decline in Ada’s popularity, it has become increasingly difficult to find skilled Ada developers to maintain this legacy code. Code maintainers who don’t know Ada typically convert the code to a language they understand, which is a tedious error-prone process. A conversion engine is needed that converts Ada into more widely supported languages, provides guidance on translation, and plugs in to the maintainer’s IDE. Such an engine must provide a view of each module within the context of the legacy application and weigh the relative merits of various conversion options. The converted code must also be validated against the legacy code to ensure accurate and effective conversion. Our proposed LANguage Conversion Engine (LANCE) will not only accurately translate and validate Ada code but also provide the necessary guidance to wrap or rewrite code that cannot or should not be translated. This guidance will include the necessary metadata to integrate the various code modules that have been translated, wrapped, and rewritten. Finally, the system’s software repository will store translated code modules for cataloging and reuse.