Refine for language translation

PL/1, NATURAL, MANTIS, VAGEN, APS, PACBASE

Amongst the hundreds of programming languages invented over the past 50 years, a large number are now obsolete, neglected and abandoned, leaving few alternatives to IT departments. With the technological innovations of Refine, automatic language translation has become the most inexpensive and reliable solution for eliminating the risks and costs associated with maintaining an obsolete language.

Solution overview

In order to reduce costs, risks and deadlines, the Refine translators guarantee:

an extremely high level of automation (generally between 99.9 and 99.99%),
high accuracy (measured by the defects injection rate by the translator) of between 10-4 and 10-5
performance retention

Source/ Target

We have developed and implemented language translators for several dozen syntaxes:

Programming languages	ABAP, ADS, IDEAL, MANTIS, NATURAL, PL/1
Generation languages	COOL:GEN, CSP, DELTA, PACBASE, PROTEE, VA-GEN ...
Script languages	CLIST, DCL, ECL, GCL, JCL, PROC, REXX, TACL, T-REXX...
Query languages	BETTER, EASYTRIEVE, ENFORM, IQS, SAS…
Presentation languages	BMS, FORMS, PRE-FORMS, RITE, SCREEN-COBOL, VIP, VPLUS...

Refine can generate many target languages, including C/C++, COBOL, EGL (an IBM 4GL), JAVA, XML, etc. Some of these translators were written by members of the Refine community (see Refine SDK).


	Benefits The automation and scalability, combined with the high degree of Refine translator precision, considerably reduces the risks and complexity of our translation projects. Extreme industrialization of translation resources not only allows quality and deadline management, but also cost optimization by outsourcing all or part of the translation and mass tests. At the outset of the translation project, a proportion of the processes and tools used for the project can be kept for improving future tests, project management and maintenance.