But it can be time consuming. Back in college, a friend asked for some help with his homework in implementing a linked list. I did the whole Socratic method o

But it can be time consuming. Back in college, a friend asked for some help with his homework in implementing a linked list. I did the whole Socratic method on him, and it took (from what I recall) about four hours for him to have his "aha" moment. Sometimes it's just easier to say, "Oh, you want to support local variables in your compiler? Easy, just implement your symbol table this way and support for local variables will just fall out as a side effect."