If you have a suspicious supervisor, sometimes you have to introduce the complications in more subtle ways.

I once used to do work on an invoicing system for people selling cars; the program's job was to take an invoice template and fill it in. Naturally the template language could only be interesting if it were Turing-complete, but with suspicious minds around me I had to go for a two-pronged attack - get two different customers to request two different features, one of which required an optional line ("skip the following line if this value is zero") and the other of which required a dynamically-selected continuation template.

Once I had those two in place I had control flow, and shortly thereafter I had the vehicle-invoicing prime number generator: about 300 lines across 7 templates.

Ah, happy days. :)

Hugo

In reply to Re: How To Survive In Maintaince Programming (ACK! NO!) by hv
in thread How To Survive In Maintaince Programming (ACK! NO!) by SpanishInquisition

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