I am engaged in a project that works mainly in AutoCAD to design and manufacture prefabricated building components such as roofing trusses. One of our goals is to redesign a program that was written in LISP that functions in designing roofing trusses. We are to rewrite the LISP code in C# and incrementally implement it into the current libraries that they have set up.
My problem is that I have been tasked with building a rudimentary LISP to C# converter. After some research (as Google results quickly show that such a thing does not readily exist on hand), I have come to the question of which way of converting this legacy code would be more efficient. Would it be better to take chunks of the LISP code to analyze and rewrite in C#, or should I continue on with developing a rudimentary converter for the AutoLISP code?
You should take chunks of the LISP code and rewrite in C#.
Even if it was less effort to write a general purpose LISP interpreter in C# than to rewrite the LISP in c# (which is highly improbable), the LISP is probably running AutoCAD commands like you would type in the AutoCAD command line instead doing things the ObjectARX way. So you would also need to convert the commands to use the ObjectARX API.