A veteran programmer received a two -year -old granddaughter’s visit a few days. It was then that he recalled that in 1997 he scheduled an application in Visual Basic 4 an application that might have fun. The problem was that he only had the executable, and it was not easy to be able to use it in his current equipment, so he came up with an idea.
Translate this old APP to Python. What he did, as said in Reddit (With a post -written post for this AI), it was to upload the executable as an entrance for the newly launched the Claude 3.7 model. He asked him for something simple: “Can you tell me how to run this file? I think I scheduled it with Visual Basic 4, it would be great to turn it to Python.”
Inverse pseudoengineering. The surprising thing is that Claude 3.7 showed some warnings, but then began to analyze the binary file and identified some program components. In fact it went further and translated that code to Python using the Pygame bookstore.
Modernized code. The AI system managed to perfectly replicate the functionality of the original program, and the model also provided instructions to install and execute it without problem, but it also was executed and operated 100% from the first moment. And all in five minutes.
And modifications, the ones you want. This user would then ask for some improvements, such as associating certain sounds to the space bar or adding color typefaces, and Claude 3.7 modified the code perfectly to offer those improvements.
But. The user shared All conversation in Claude so that anyone could check the process that followed. As Visual Basic said P-Code (Pseudocode), a kind of intermediate compilation in which there are some recognizable elements, but not too many to help that reverse engineering task.
A door to modernize old software projects. It is true that the pseudocode generated by VB facilitated that “reverse engineering” task, but still this experiment with Claude 3.7 seems to open the door for many other software projects to modernize.
A way out for mastodons created with Cobol or Fortran? In fact, already very veteran programming languages such as Cobol or Fortan are still very important in industries such as banking, and force to maintain systems that can maintain compatibility with these old applications.
Lack of programmers. There are no longer many programmers who dedicate themselves to these programming languages, which makes them “translate” them to more modern programming languages is especially interesting. In 2023 IBM showed precisely A IA -based project to translate Cobol programsbut it is not clear if that has allowed to complete ambitious projects in that sense. What Claude 3.7 of course opens the door to achieve it.
THE EXAMPLE OF MOCAS. We have already talked about Moccas, software created in 1958 and used in the US administration for the “mechanization of administration service contracts.” It is scheduled in Cobol-in fact it was originally programmed in Flow-Matic-and continues to work today, but it has been a long time since in the US They look for ways to adapt it to the new times. Perhaps Claude 3.7 or similar AI models manage to offer a solution to that problem.
Even so, difficult. The example shown by that veteran programmer is striking, but it was a small application. Projects such as Moccas are enormously more complex and are part of a series of interdependencies with other components, which makes this possible task of reverse engineering and translation more difficult. But be careful: it may not be impossible, and at least Claude 3.7 and other models can end up being precisely the tool we needed to carry out that task.
Image | Flipflopflorida
In Xataka | Young programmers no longer know how
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