I've actually been involved in at least three projects to do precisely that. And mostly they worked fine.
In two of the three cases I was converting between "the same language" but different incompatible versions of it and the original code bases had strict style guides. At the end of it everything worked brilliantly, and the code was just as maintainable as it was before the conversion.
In the third case was an full lexer/parser built out to compile VBScript down to JavaScript. The resulting code was not readable or maintainable but it did run and that satisfied the needs of the project.
In my experience is that language conversion projects are gnarly, and depend heavily on style guides and accurate specifications for the languages to produce good output. But these are not doomed enterprises from the start and in the end it's the quality of your convertering code that determines the success of the project.
In two of the three cases I was converting between "the same language" but different incompatible versions of it and the original code bases had strict style guides. At the end of it everything worked brilliantly, and the code was just as maintainable as it was before the conversion.
In the third case was an full lexer/parser built out to compile VBScript down to JavaScript. The resulting code was not readable or maintainable but it did run and that satisfied the needs of the project.
In my experience is that language conversion projects are gnarly, and depend heavily on style guides and accurate specifications for the languages to produce good output. But these are not doomed enterprises from the start and in the end it's the quality of your convertering code that determines the success of the project.