This is my first Perl developing contract. I have been in this company for approx less than 4.5 months. Initially it was a 3 month contract, and then at the end of the 3rd month, it was extended to another month. Off course I wasn’t happy with this arrangement, but there wasn’t anything I can do about it.

Odd.

Why did you stay if you weren't happy?

My boss has asked me to give him the source code to an application that I have developed – that the full cycle, from the concept, design, coding, testing, documentation and deployment. The problem is he has also have asked me to comment every single line the code. He explained that he needs to know what every single line does, by the way he is not a developer nor had development background.

Well, there's no need to take him literally: you probably don't need to put a comment on each line. However, you probably do need to write a comment block for each group of lines.

Here's some recent code of mine:

  #  Get the Form object and collect the variable 
  #  information as submitted.
  
  my $Form = new CGI;
  my $Vars = $Form->Vars;
  
  #  Encode apostrophes so MySQL doesn 't worry.
  
  foreach ( keys %{ $Vars } )   
  { 
    $Vars->{ $_ } =~ s/'/\\'/g; 
  }
[download]

I don't have every line commented, but the comments are frequent enough that I feel it's sufficiently documented.

More requests came in to add more facilities and functions to the script, in other words ”they kept moving the goal post”, the goal post are so far apart I can’t see any of the posts anymore.

This is a problem? It sounds like they loved your work and because you were working out, they wanted to add more functionality. That sounds like a win-win situation to me.

Nothing my contract explicitly says that I should comment every single line of my code before I leave so they can bring any Jerko to take over the script? Can they?

Yes, they can bring anyone in to work on the script you developed. You're under contract to them, they own whatever you develop for them.

Now, if the new guy calls up asking questions, be helpful for the first 15 minutes, but after that you can suggest that your time is billable and perhaps the new guy should get the client to authorize payment for some of your time.

--t. alex
but my friends call me T.

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