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vapourlang / vapour

Typed superset of R
http://vapour.run
Apache License 2.0
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Future idea: migration tool #69

Open asbates opened 1 month ago

asbates commented 1 month ago

One thing to consider for the future is a migration tool to help convert existing R code to vapour.

This came up in a conversation with a coworker who noted it could be challenging to adopt vapour in existing code bases. The example they gave is vapour's use of = instead of <- for assignment. Of course, this could probably be done via a simple find-and-replace. But I think it suggests people could be hesitant to adopt for fear of the (perceived) workload required to translate R to vapour. Having a tool that can handle most of that could help ease the fear.

JohnCoene commented 1 month ago

Thanks!

We can think of a tool in the long-term, much of the syntax should be easy to translate but the types will not be.

As Vapour aims to be to R what Typescript is to Javascript, another idea is to add roxgen2 tags that declare types, like jsdoc allows.