Re: converting VB programs (was Re: developing a K12 Linux distribution)

[Micah Yoder <LYoder@cyberis.net>]

Doug Loss wrote:

> Although I don't want to discourage you from doing that, you might want
> to contact the original author of the programs and see if he'd be
> interested in rewriting them in Tcl/Tk or Perl/Tk or something like
> that.  They could then be useful across a wider variety of machines (as

I've actually thought before about what it would take to write a
VB->Perl/Tk converter.  I used VB in my last job quite a bit so I'm
fairly familiar with the language and the file formats.

I think it would be doable, and not *too* hard if you limited support to
the standard VB controls.  This may be enough for most free education
programs.  The biggest problem is that a LOT of programs use third party
add on controls, especially in corporations, and there's NO WAY those
could be converted (unless of course we'd write all the functionality in
Perl/Tk, which would be rather difficult for some of them).

I don't know if I'd still be interested in doing it or not.  I would
have been at one time.  Actually I think the VB language parser would be
the hardest part, and it's a rather simple language...

But is there a LOT of free software written in VB, especially for
education?  If so, it might still be worth thinking about an automatic
converter.