Application and user interface migration from BASIC to Visual C++

An approach to reengineer BASIC PC legacy code into modern graphical systems is proposed. BASIC has historically been one of the first languages available on PCs. Based on it, small or medium size companies have developed systems that represent valuable company assets to be preserved. Our goal is the automatic migration from the BASIC character oriented user interface to a graphical environment which includes a GUI builder, and compiles event driven C/C++ code. For this purpose a conceptual representation in terms of abstract graphical objects and call-backs has been inferred from the original code, and a translator from BASIC to C has been developed. Moreover the GUI builder internal representation has been generated, so that the user interface can be interactively fine-tuned by the programmer. We present and discuss BASIC peculiarities, with preliminary results on code translation. For the explanation of our approach to user interface migration an example is used throughout the text