Hi David!

The syntax will make the migration APPEAR easier. I migrated relatively recently from clipper to vfp. The syntax of both languages is similar enough to mislead the novice in this regard.

The paradigm of both languages is quite different and that's where the "ease of portability" chimera falls apart.

And this, with a 10 year-old language (clipper) that was quite ahead of its time (and is still more advanced than vfp in a few areas).

I don't even want to begin to picture the hair-tearing experiences a cobol programmer will go through after having bought the "bridge of portability" story.

Whenever there's a change of paradigm, and this is just my opinion, portability is simply non-existant (even if the syntax is kept unchanged).

Alex



>An interesting question to ask is how much of the syntax of all those 19 languages has to change for .NET. Do they lose capabilities? I don't know the answer, but it's an interesting question to ask.
>
>IOW, don't assume that all the ports are easy or full-function or provide backward compatability. I imagine their main usefulness is in easy the porting of legacy code.