What you did took more effort than they were willing to do. for the journalist; "deadline approaching, weekend approaching. Double-check it on a few sites, seems like everyone agrees, screw it, I'm going home..." Some of them don't know how to do a patent search. Some don't even know they should under those circumstances. They also would not have looked at the original drawings to make sure it was data entered correctly, nor would they know the difference between a filing and the grant of the patent date, which are years apart for this item. A professional historian probably would, but not a professional journalist. _____________________________ Give a man a mug, he drinks for a day. Teach a man to mug... The difference between an ostrich and the average voter is where they stick their heads.

I've not heard a specific term for this, but you could use 'economic repair' (I've not heard of that one either) just as well with computer assets as physical ones. If they're hiring you, it should be because they respect your domain knowledge, so just tell them that it will be quicker and cheaper to rewrite it properly than to tweak it. And hopefully teach them a few things about why you shouldn't write websites in Word while you're at it, heh.

On a more direct note, I call it Marketing. The stuff they produce regarding our products certainly bears no resemblence to the reality. Software Zen: delete this;

The layout is not pretty and I would have commented it a lot more thoroughly, but there is nothing wrong with a complex if statement. I know that the refactoring polizei will feel that 1000 statements are better than one but as long as the code is well laid out and well commented (which this isn't), then a single statement can be simpler to follow. The warning, incidentally, is for the final stanza in the line after the comment // LANG_hu section: spec. Hungarian rule. The compiler is guessing that rv = affix_check(st,i) should be rv == affix_check(st,i)