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Comment by nanexcool | Hacker News Reader

Stallman thinks he lives in a black and white world, when in reality it's all shades of gray. His zealotry is getting tiresome (for me).

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I agree with that, (he believes all software should have to be open-source, I believe) but I also agree with this post.

This post is not saying "we shouldn't make anything relying on any non-free software because all software should be free software." It's a pragmatic post saying, "look, it's likely that all of the man-years going into C# free software will be lost when we can't run that software on our machines. So write it in something that we'll be able to use on Unix forever." If someone chose a proprietary framework with official implementations on Unix systems, this post wouldn't say that those are bad as well.

One cool thing about C# (and the .NET platform in general) is the ability to translate your code into another programming language (aside from some possibly incompatible differences in programming languages). So there's really not much stopping anyone from writing a C# to Java converter that would handle a decent chunk of the porting (so you wouldn't lose any software), and then you could just fix up the minor stuff yourself.

For an example, check out the .NET reflector. By default, it lets you convert between C#, VB.NET, (Managed) C++, and CIL. You can also get plugins for IronPython and so forth.

http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/ (it's free)

The ability to translate between two programming languages is called a compiler. There is theoretically nothing stopping anyone from writing a anything-to-anything "converter" (you mean compiler).

No, the right word is translator. A compiler generally creates a form optimised for execution, like machine code or bytecodes. A translator creates source code files from other source code files.

The program the poster was referring to is actually a disassembler, taking Microsoft IL (assembly for the virtual machine) and converting it to a .Net language. So you might;

- compile C# to Microsoft IL - decompile the IL back to IronPython - use that as the basis of a CPython version.

I do not want to enter a dispute concerning naming, but I'll just point out that many consider a compiler to be anything that you might call translator. What would you call a program that transforms C code in assembler code? Isn't assembler code source code?

If there are indeed patent threats any time, it can be worked around or that part of the functionality can be removed.

Why throw the baby out with the bath water?

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