Migrating dmd to D?

[Zach the Mystic]

On Saturday, 2 March 2013 at 04:28:40 UTC, Zach the Mystic wrote:
> Last year I boiled down existing ddmd to:
>
> https://github.com/zachthemystic/ddmd-clean/
>
> I did it because I needed to teach myself programming, and 
> maybe there was a long shot that someone would want to use it. 
> I rather angrily attached the GPL license because I thought I 
> had to. But flexibility in this area comes as a welcome 
> surprise.
>
> I want to make another point. Dmd is perhaps written in a way 
> that might be easier to create an automatic program translating 
> it to D than other C++ programs. I guess that approach is worth 
> at least a small amount of investigation. The question is 
> whether the number of special cases required to automate will 
> take more toll than the grunt work of direct translation.

You would definitely need an identifier translation table:

"Dsymbols *" -> "Dsymbol[]"
"NULL" -> "null"
`//printf("...%d...", s)` -> `writef("...%s...", s)`
"#ifdef XIFDEFVERSION" + nested ifdefs + "#endif"
-> "version(XIFDEFVERSION) {" + nested {}'s + "}"

"#ifdef 0" -> "version(none)"

To assemble a class, you'd need a list of methods to look up, and 
hints where to look up each method.

It would be good to develop a small domain specific language just 
for translating this. The better the language, the easier it 
would be to add all the special cases I'm sure would be necessary.