I have a specific problem. I want to sell one of my models, programmed in the R programming language. I want to show the prospective client that there is a lot of advanced work in the code, and there is a lot of it, representing about 700 hours of R&D (around 2000 lines of R code). So, I want to send him the code. To impress him.
However I obviously don’t want to disclose the full workings of the code, so I was thinking of garbling every third or fourth line, so that it cannot simply be OCR’d and replicated. I don’t want to go down the NDA route, nor is the client adept at programming (wouldn’t be able to replicate it himself – though could hire a programmer I guess). I’d also probably garble completely one or two key functions.
How would I do this in Vi / Vim?
Is there any other way of solving my issue that someone could suggest?
Yes I know I could show him the output of the program as the sales pitch, which I have already done, but we’re haggling on pricing so a bit of “blinding with science” through a code listing, to see how much work is involved, won’t hurt. It is my experience that many non-programmers have no idea of how much work can go into a piece of software.
I fully back the points brought up by Xavier T., but if you still think you need to show some representation of the full body of code to make an impression about the amount of your work, I’d either:
:set printfont=Courier_h4); obviously, this only works for paper copies, not PDFs.x, as in:%substitute/\a/x/g