I work with Meditech, a very proprietary hospital system that is programmed in a language called "Magic". (Are any of you Monks familiar with it?) It's a difficult system to interface with, but it is possible to do some scripting into it using Visual Basic and some windows dlls.
I had a similar problem once, although rather than Magic
I was stuck with a rather awful (er, "beginner-friendly")
scripting language for a thankfully-mostly-forgotten IVR
system. The first project I had to write was a nightmare.
The second one was easier: prompted by the local guru, I'd
written a set of Perl scripts to translate an XML
descriptiom into a code framework. By the time I left that
job, my Perl scripts were generating all the code I needed,
as well as all of the supporting documentation and even the
test suites.
The moral of that story: if you can't write code to solve
your problems in a sane language, write code that writes
code to solve your problems in a sane language.
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Found a typo in this node? /msg me
% man 3 strfry