Yeah that's fucked up. From two perspectives 1. Who ever wrote that library needs money to survive. 2. From the company point of view they wasted WAY more money on the development then the license. Hell if 1 developer spent a day to do it, they paid more than they would for the license
If it makes you feel better at my last company I asked the "senior validation specialist" what the validation path would be for a program which incorporated unit tests.
I worked on a laser seam welder which basically was programmed in a mix of g code and I guess vb??
The fun part was variables could only be numbers between 100 to 999. So let's say you have a sensor and need to verify it's within a certain range. You could set #525 to 10 and #526 to 20 then say #527 = sensor 1 signal. Now lower down you verify it as
if(#525 > #527 || #526 < #527){show error}
Now you could create each variable at the beginning with comment of what it was but then have to keep referring to the top to remind yourself what number was what. Or create the variable at first use so it was closer but now it's spread across the document.
I went with first case and just printed out the first 2 pages which listed all the variables.
Before you ask, I talked to the guy who wrote the language and made the system many times he confirmed you couldn't use variable names.
I agree but I would say if there are variable token costs depending on report it would be nice if client sent request to server, server calculates x tokens to be used, sends x to client, client confirms that's acceptable, server does work.
Like if I expected a report to be 2 tokens but because of some quirk or a typo or something it cost 200 tokens I would like a chance to cancel it if it's not worth it.
If you did and it was usable across multiple cnc manufacturers you could make a pretty penny.