in reply to How do you name the possibilities?

You might have some luck with defining a standard product and then only specifying the deviations from it. For example you could order a BigMac ( BigMac ), or a BigMac with no cheese ( BigMac-Nc ).

Hopefully this would lead to the common orders being simple ( BigMac ) whilst the complicated orders get longer ( BigMac-NcEgPbNt: BigMac, no cheese, extra gerkins, plain bun, not toasted ). As the odd orders are rare it does not matter that they are longer.

Feel free to adapt to your problem domain.

--tidiness is the memory loss of environmental mnemonics

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom