I believe just about every programmer has fallen victim to this before. I have. But the fact that B does not fix the problem suggests that the programmer who

I believe just about every programmer has fallen victim to this before. I have. But the fact that B does not fix the problem suggests that the programmer who wrote it didn't understand the problem. The most common, but very wrong, answer is to keep tinkering. As Andrew Koenig says in C Traps and Pitfalls, "Fiddling with a program until it appears to work is a reliable way of obtaining a program that almost works." Campaign finance reform strikes me very much as a collection of ill-considered patches on top of other ill-considered patches.