Apologies if this has already been discussed before, I didn't see answers to each of my questions. I'm interested in thoughts from those of you who understand programming at a deeper level than Thinkscript tinkering, and understand the documentation on the Thinkscript language and the limits of how transparent its built-in functions are.
Suppose that someday, TD Ameritrade / Schwab became an awful broker platform either because they started offering scammier fills, charging exorbitant trade fees, etc. In that case, if we'd developed a profitable strategy reliant on Thinkscript indicators and therefore locked to the ThinkOrSwim platform, we'd want to port the indicators to a new platform. Would it be possible to do this with a 1:1 or nearly 1:1 replication of how they function on ThinkOrSwim?
Even without having to entertain hypothetical scenarios, we can consider now the fact that TD doesn't allow premarket trading before 7am. So with a sufficiently profitable strategy based on custom Thinkscript indicators, it would make sense for someone who wakes up early to port everything to a code language that could integrate with a broker that allows premarket trading from 4am onwards (assuming that the strategy worked as well at 4am as later, and suffered from the delay involved in chart-reading on ToS and then entering orders on another platform during early premarket -- that's money lost for every hour that we can't trade if our strategy works just as well during those locked-out early hours). Likewise with the poor availability of shares to short small caps, and I'm sure there are other reasons that some people might benefit from changing platforms.
The relevant questions, then, are:
1) Is the Thinkscript language well documented enough and its inner workings transparent enough that a workspace of studies could be reliably converted and reproduced accurately in another language / platform?
2) Is the complexity of that conversion something that would necessarily require manual human effort, or could it be automated by an interpreter that is programmed to parse and convert Thinkscript into another language?
3) Would it take hundreds of hours to either manually convert a complex workspace or develop an automation tool for converting Thinkscript, or should it be possible with only a few dozen hours or less given sufficient programming capability?
4) Would developing such an automation tool, if possible, and making it available publicly be in violation of the ToS user agreement or raise possible legal risks?
5) What is the main reason or reasons that such a tool hasn't already been developed?
Suppose that someday, TD Ameritrade / Schwab became an awful broker platform either because they started offering scammier fills, charging exorbitant trade fees, etc. In that case, if we'd developed a profitable strategy reliant on Thinkscript indicators and therefore locked to the ThinkOrSwim platform, we'd want to port the indicators to a new platform. Would it be possible to do this with a 1:1 or nearly 1:1 replication of how they function on ThinkOrSwim?
Even without having to entertain hypothetical scenarios, we can consider now the fact that TD doesn't allow premarket trading before 7am. So with a sufficiently profitable strategy based on custom Thinkscript indicators, it would make sense for someone who wakes up early to port everything to a code language that could integrate with a broker that allows premarket trading from 4am onwards (assuming that the strategy worked as well at 4am as later, and suffered from the delay involved in chart-reading on ToS and then entering orders on another platform during early premarket -- that's money lost for every hour that we can't trade if our strategy works just as well during those locked-out early hours). Likewise with the poor availability of shares to short small caps, and I'm sure there are other reasons that some people might benefit from changing platforms.
The relevant questions, then, are:
1) Is the Thinkscript language well documented enough and its inner workings transparent enough that a workspace of studies could be reliably converted and reproduced accurately in another language / platform?
2) Is the complexity of that conversion something that would necessarily require manual human effort, or could it be automated by an interpreter that is programmed to parse and convert Thinkscript into another language?
3) Would it take hundreds of hours to either manually convert a complex workspace or develop an automation tool for converting Thinkscript, or should it be possible with only a few dozen hours or less given sufficient programming capability?
4) Would developing such an automation tool, if possible, and making it available publicly be in violation of the ToS user agreement or raise possible legal risks?
5) What is the main reason or reasons that such a tool hasn't already been developed?