This is a very good question.
Imagine you are a customer, how you would like the system to have?
If you just like to have a You Tiao and your friend just like to have a  Tau Fu Fa, how will you order?

I will qualify the question as a question that a junior programmer will ask cause it will still need to recompile the program every time changes happen?

That inspire me to create a thread and discuss about this.

So far I haven't see any "codemaster" that can come out with the algorithm  to do that.

To further answer your consideration, may be a POS system doesn't care if it is charged as a la cart or set. But the same algorithm can be used by a courier company or ship cargo. Imagine the price is a volume that require to fit an item (alacarte). There are only certain type of boxes (set). How many boxes are needed how to maximized the space utilization. The shipment company will pay you tons of money to come out with a program that can do that.

A senior would not plan coding in 1st Place.
never.
You need to design a relational database 1st.
then you build you logic

Heh, some business requirements may be counter intuitive. e.g.

1. Burger RM8
2. Fries RM3
3. Drink RM3
Set A: Burger+Fries+Drink = RM10

Someone who just order burger and drink is actually better off getting set A, which contained fries they don't want.

So, should the optimizer auto add a Fries to the person's order to get Set A? Or should the system leave it to the cashier?

Or can the system handle a Set with optional components? e.g. Order Set A, minus Fries?

Anyone tried ordering kopi-o kosong tanpa kopi before? Might be cheaper than their mineral water...

I classify it as a work of senior programmer based on the following criteria

1.)  menu and order are read in from file instead of key in manually, this make the program easy to process big amount of data.
2.)  Separating static data (menu) storage with program binary make the program much more easy to adopt changes. Changes in menu, that can happen time to time doesn't require re-compile of binary files.

I've been watching this thread for a while. This is satirical right?

All the discussion about "hey if I do it this way I'm a senior" etc. is just unproductive and honestly a little bit childish.

At the end of the day, it's about project requirements.

If your requirement is introductory university level, no senior or staff or coding ninja will set up a POS application with 100% test coverage, backed by a cluster of database instances etc.

Go ahead if you just want to have fun building a toy POS system that uses the terminal for input. But stop with the labeling nonsense please, it's childish.

can i join the fun? my c is pretty shitty

1.) Manual update menu.csv file are error prompt.
2.) Might not cover all cases
3.) Not enough testing has been performed.
4.)  The combination will grow ex potentially when the bulk number increase and/or the electable items increase.

S1.) Problem 1 and 2 can still be solved by using 2 independent editor and compare their result.
S2.) Problem 2 and 3 can ask ChatGPT to help generate the necessary test case or at least we now there are 21 combinations in advance.
S3.) Problem 4 can ask CharGPT to display all the possible combination , copy and paste the result into menu.csv. Or write a program to generates the possible combination to update the mene.csv accordingly.

From S2 and S3, we can foresee that using AI assisted program will be the future trend.
A lot of minor and repetitive jobs that can be done by more human are totally replaced by AI.
More and more university graduates will find them even harder to look for new jobs cause they have been replaced by AI

Interestingly, I asked ChatGPT to showcase me all the possible combinations and it can't get me a satisfied answer yet.

So, I wrote a program to generates all the possible combination to make 5 draws of the A,B,C characters.

A,A,A,A,A
A,A,A,A,B
A,A,A,A,C
A,A,A,B,B
A,A,A,B,C
A,A,A,C,C
A,A,B,B,B
A,A,B,B,C
A,A,B,C,C
A,A,C,C,C
A,B,B,B,B
A,B,B,B,C
A,B,B,C,C
A,B,C,C,C
A,C,C,C,C
B,B,B,B,B
B,B,B,B,C
B,B,B,C,C
B,B,C,C,C
B,C,C,C,C
C,C,C,C,C
I used about 2 hours to write and debug the program and charGPT use just few seconds to know that there should be 21 lines.
Even though it is unable to provides a satisfied answer, Im sure it will eventually after another few rounds of training. 

When it reach that point, easier to migrate the csvs to a file-based database like SQLite. No need something overkill like PostgreSQL/MySQL yet.
Then later got requirements to keep track of sales, analysis of best selling promos, etc. etc. (imagination starting to run wild  ).

And before we know it, we have an open source POS system born from a single post in Lowyat forum 

Just notice this line...
Most people may believe senior professional should be good at their work,
their skills set, and should learn from them.



Should we think "a bad programmer does not deserve to be a senior programmer" ?

 

Or should we called such people "a senior but bad programmer" ?
Is this an insult of their work (not skill) ?

Dunno about you guys, but I'm still junior, at least according to LYN's description of my profile (look to the left). Need to up the post counts before I'm not junior. Damn it's hard. Been trying years.