[Gambas-user] how to convert VB Project file to Gambas

[Rob Kudla]

On 12/13/2013 08:30 AM, Jussi Lahtinen wrote:
> Rob, you haven't use Gambas for years?

Nope, don't even have Gambas installed anywhere except on the host that
runs gambasdoc.org.

I still think Gambas is a great language (I'm still reading the list every
day, after all) and if I were writing desktop software anymore, that's what
I'd use. For web stuff I use regexes enough that perl is nicer to deal with
(I don't know if Gambas has a regex operator now instead of using my
terrible component, but at the time it didn't.) Mobile's a different story,
but since Gambas doesn't work on Android yet, I've gotten very used to Java
and obviously there's a huge critical mass of support in place for that.

Anyway, the converter I wrote only operated on project files and form
layout files, not code. Converting VB code automatically isn't realistic
because they're really two very different languages. It's a porting job. I
just wanted to automate the grunt work. I also wrote a perl script to
convert my Gambas forms to HTML forms, but it used a Javascript library
that was very buggy and is no longer maintained. And before all of that I
wrote scripts to convert MS Access forms to VB. I do these things out of
laziness and the fact that I'd almost always rather use a keyboard than a
mouse, so writing code is preferable to dragging and dropping.

Rob