Migrating a Basic Character Oriented Application Interface to a Visual C++ Graphical User Interface under Windows

In this paper, 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 throughout the time 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 callbacks 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 will present and discuss our approach to user interface migration, with some preliminary experimental results. For the explanation of our approach, an example will be used throughout the tex