[Gambas-devel] Re: Gambas and Visual Basic

[Richard Stallman]

    I thought we could continue the discussion on the devel mailing-list of 
    Gambas, as many other people already use Gambas for translating Visual-Basic 
    projects, and so may have better ideas than mine.

Ok.

    I sent you in a last mail an OpenOffice document which describes the way I 
    think it is possible to use Gambas for translating VB projects. 

I don't have OpenOffice installed, so I can't read that format.  (I
don't know why I didn't say this the first time--perhaps I didn't
notice that the attachment was there, or perhaps I saw it and wasn't
sure what to say and forgot about it and then deleted the message.
Either way, sorry.)

If you send me the information in plain text, then I will read it.

    As I tried to say before, directly compiling VB source code in Gambas, Java, 
    or any other bytecode does not solve the big problems: calls to external 
    Windows DLLs, use of ActiveX controls and objects, use of ActiveX automation. 

I understand this part, but I disagree with the conclusion.  Just
because this won't solve all the problems is no reason not to do it.
Solving part of the problem is better than nothing,  Every long journey
starts with a single step.  This can be the first step.

I think the ReactOS developers are writing replacements for many Windows
DLLs.  That would be a second step.  Eventually we will do it all.

If you do the part of this job that you can straightforwardly do,
it will be a great start.  So how about it?