Experiment in language translation for two orthogonal architectures

Abstract

With the development of new hardware structures, the software developed on existing machines cannot be transported without much redesign and possibly recoding. With the availability of multiprocessors that can run more than one operating system concurrently, it is possible to transport software developed on the native machine to some host machine that runs the same operating system with automatic translation. In this paper we describe our experience on the conversion of VAX Assembly Language source programs to Elxsi Assembly Language equivalent programs. The problems involved in the translation due to the orthogonality of the hardware and the results of the conversion are reported.