> FORM was written by mortal humans (with much cruder tools!) in the first place, there is no reason to believe it couldn't be done again if need be and even improved in the process
Sure, but how long will that take and how robust will the result be? Given the description of the design, it basically sounds like it does efficient block-level storage management in order to handle the petabytes of data that it might need to churn through, so basically you're reimplementing a DB storage engine, which is no small feat to get right and performant.
Furthermore, is there a test suite to validate that the FORM2.0 yields the same results for all past papers?
These problems are not unsolvable but they're not trivial either.
Sure, but how long will that take and how robust will the result be? Given the description of the design, it basically sounds like it does efficient block-level storage management in order to handle the petabytes of data that it might need to churn through, so basically you're reimplementing a DB storage engine, which is no small feat to get right and performant.
Furthermore, is there a test suite to validate that the FORM2.0 yields the same results for all past papers?
These problems are not unsolvable but they're not trivial either.