Pinderkent

I read through an article today that suggested an idea for a Web site where a user can specify a task in a programming language they know, and the site tells them how to perform it in some other language.

This is an interesting idea, and no doubt could make for a useful site in some cases, but would likely run into problems creating the relationships between languages. Even something as crucial as string handling can differ significantly between different languages. C treats strings as arrays of characters. C++ treats strings similarly to C, but also has for example the std::string class for representing strings. Java treats strings as an object. Erlang treats strings as lists of integers.

So operations that are available in one language may not really have an immediate equivalent in another language. Likewise, the approach taken when using one language may be completely inappropriate, in terms of performance or memory usage, when using another language. Such a Web site would need to ensure that these differences and the potential risks were clearly stated. But otherwise, I think it might actually be useful, even if the article suggesting it was somewhat in jest.