Syntactic program language translation

• US 20070038985A1
• Filed: 08/10/2005
• Published: 02/15/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 08/10/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Ahmed, Haroon, Aharoni, Avner, Meijer, Henricus, Pfleiger, Todd
• Granted Patent: US 7,779,396 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 717/137
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/51 Source to source

Abstract

The subject disclosure pertains to computer programming languages and translation or conversion thereof. Rather than a complicated semantics preserving translation or conversion from a first source language to a second target language, the conversion can be one of syntax. The conversion can be accomplished, for example, via employment of a map that defines the relation between the syntax of the first language and the second language. The semantics of at least a part of the first language can be defined by the second target language. Thus, the first language can be open-ended and/or semantically extensible based on the second language.

Claims

1. A translation system for computer programming code comprising:

a parser component that receives programmatic code; and

a translation component that performs a syntactic translation of the code based on a map of syntax, operations, and identifier names of a first source language versus that of a second target language.

2. The system of claim 1, the translation component maps at least a portion of the syntax, operations, expressions and/or statements to the second target language to reflect the target language semantics.

3. The system of claim 2, the translation component maps a portion of the syntax, operations, expressions and/or statements to reflect source language semantics.

4. The system of claim 3, the translation component maps identifier names verbatim from the source to the target language.

5. The system of claim 4, the source language is an object-oriented language and the target language is a database query language.

6. The system of claim 4, the source language is an XML query or transformation language and the target language is a database query language.

7. The system of claim 1, further comprising a receiver component that receives a map from outside the system and a registration component that stores the map to a computer readable medium.

8. The system of claim 1, further comprising a language identification component that identifies source and target languages and a map retrieval component that locates the map that facilitates translation from the source to the target language.

9. The system of claim 1, further comprising:

a syntax match component that identifies the closest related syntax, operations, and identifier names between programmatic elements of the source language and the target language; and

a generation component that generates the map that associates the syntax, operations, and identifier names of the source language that of the target language.

10. A computer implemented programmatic expansion method comprising:

obtaining an expression including at least one sub-expression in a first program language;

translating the expression to corresponding syntax of a second program language; and

translating the sub-expression logic verbatim from the first to the second program language without regard to semantics of the first language.

11. The method of claim 10, further comprising identifying the first and second language and locating a corresponding syntax map.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising employing the map to identify corresponding syntax during translation.

13. The method of claim 10, the first program language expression is a query and the second program language is a data source query language.

14. The method of claim 13, the first program language is object oriented.

15. The method of claim 13, the first program language is an XML query or transformation language and the second language is a structured query language.

16. The method of claim 13, the first programming language is XPath/XQuery and the second programming language is SQL the expression is a path and the sub-expression is a predicate or filter expression translated directly into the Where clause of a Select statement.

17. A syntactic translation method comprising:

obtaining syntax of a first program language;

obtaining syntax of a second program language; and

generating a computer-readable map of corresponding syntax.

18. The method of claim 17, further comprising obtaining context information and employing such information in generating the map.

19. The method of claim 17, further comprising providing the map to a system that translates programmatic expressions and sub-expressions from the syntax of the first language to the syntax of the second language, the sub-expressions are mapped one-to-one without conversions.

20. A computer readable medium having stored thereon computer executable instructions for carrying out the method of claim 17.