Ask HN: Are There Generalized Transpilers?

2 points

6 years ago

I have a client who has tens on thousands of legacy Base SAS programs for calculating Current Expected Credit Losses (CCEL) models. Base SAS is a commercial, interpreted language used widely in financial services for reporting and risk analysis. New hires coming into the firm mainly know Python and few know SAS. They would like to convert their exusting SAS programs into Python 3 scripts.

One obvious approach is to recode by hand the existing logic into Python. However, this is not a scalable approach.

I would like to know if there are existing tools, like a generalized transpiler that parses language X into language Y.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler

I have a reasonable understanding on mapping common Base SAS language constructions into Python. See:

www.pythonforsasusers.com

Absent such a generalized tool, what advice do you have to help automate such an effort?

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