Round Rock River: Automated Translation of Java to Python

Automated Translation of Java to Python

troy — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:58:48 -0500

I've written a tool to automatically translate Java source code to Python source code. The tool is useful, and it's already working for me as I intended. It's called java2python (clever, no?) and you can download it here.

Let me back up a bit and explain the motivation behind this. I'm the author and sole maintainer of the Python port of the Interactive Brokers API (IbPy). IB provides a default/reference Java implementation for UNIX and MacOS. This reference implementation is straight forward: it contains a Thread subclass that reads from a socket, an associated class for writing to the socket, plus a few other support classes. Conceptually pretty simple, and the initial port was actually easy (once I figured out the difference between writing data to a socket in Java and writing data to a socket in Python).

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by Don

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:40:16 -0500

Troy:

'what did you have in mind? do you need to translate a java library without intervention?'

None in particular. I just briefly fantasized about being able to use any Java library from Python without using Jython.

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by Mike

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 07:44:10 -0500

Seems the python2java translation could possibly be done with some of the cool stuff the folks at PyPy are doing with type inference and how they translate to C or CLI. Maybe one could have a backend to java code. Just a thought.

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by troy

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 10:03:16 -0500

Don,

i don't think that complex translations could be totally automated -- not without a lot more work on the translator.

but i'm not really after lexical analysis; the tool is working for me exactly like i need it to work. there's support for mapping java types to python types, there's support for changing some common java statements into the equivalent python. most important to me, there's support for per-file imports and per-file regex substitutions applied to the output.

what did you have in mind? do you need to translate a java library without intervention?

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by Don

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 04:15:50 -0500

How far do you think you can go with this?

Do you think it might be possible to convert any Java library to Python with little or no manual intervention?

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by jml

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:07:35 -0500

Pretty neat. Python is sort of a superset of Java so it seems like it should translate reasonably well. I wonder how it'll handle integer overflow.

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by Skip Montanaro

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:14:47 -0500

Given Python's runtime typing, direct conversion of Python source to Java source would be difficult if not impossible. Given the available of Jython, why bother anyway?

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by Ian Ozsvald

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:24:01 -0500

A video tutorial of python2java might be quite neat, especially to show interested users just how easy it is to get going. If anyone is interested in the idea, I'd help to make the video and we'd host it for free (and the tools are open-source) over at ShowMeDo. Just throwing this in as an idea for some extra publicity for you :-) Regards, Ian Ozsvald (co-founder showmedo.com)

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by troy

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:04:58 -0500

no plans for python2java. i don't need such a thing, and i'm not sure it would even be possible. if you're inclined to write it, please keep me posted!

"Automated Translation of Java to Python" by Demetrios Kyriakys

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:08:46 -0500

Any plans to make a Python2Java equivalent?

I think that having the translation in both directions, would increase the corectness and testability of each version, and about the "visibility" of the project not to mention :).

Thank you,