It's absolutely way more than an academic tool. What if you are writing a complex program in Perl and after toiling away at it for a while, come to realize that it would be much more efficiently done in C. Before this dictionary/translator, you'd either have to spend days redoing all the stuff that should have been in C...or you ave to settle for a worse program. Seems really fucking awesome to me. Also -- if you don't know one language, but you know another... and from what you've read about whatever you're attempting to do and what the other language you don't know is especially good for...you just write the code in the language you know and then translate it into the better one.
AND--another example that just came up for me the other day and I wish this had been available to me... You're searching online for existing modules/code written in your language to do a certain task... and you find the exact code you need, but it's in this other language from what you're using... so you either have to decrypt it and just use it as a logical guideline... or just discard it totally. If you have this translator, just pop the code snippet in and you get what you need! Of course, I was using Python at the time and the code snippet I found was in Perl... so ths translator still wouldn't have helped me as it doesn't yet encompass python. Still....
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Date: 2005-03-17 09:35 pm (UTC)AND--another example that just came up for me the other day and I wish this had been available to me... You're searching online for existing modules/code written in your language to do a certain task... and you find the exact code you need, but it's in this other language from what you're using... so you either have to decrypt it and just use it as a logical guideline... or just discard it totally. If you have this translator, just pop the code snippet in and you get what you need! Of course, I was using Python at the time and the code snippet I found was in Perl... so ths translator still wouldn't have helped me as it doesn't yet encompass python. Still....
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Date: 2005-03-17 10:01 pm (UTC)AFAIK, actual interpreters may be semantically correct, but what they produce is not exactly nice, readable code.