I was just thinking that if I _needed_ to refactor this I might structure the stages as chapters in a book. One might be able to write an inner class or some such that had a “table of contents” function that called each stage in sequence as a void function with data managed out of line, maybe via cleverly designed singleton structs. Then the code itself can be written in order with minimal boilerplate between stage boundaries.

I think I’ve worked with some Python that looked and worked this way. I can’t place the details but probably in a processor pipeline running over a particularly hairy data format. Consider ancient specifications written by engineers talking on the phone encapsulated in relatively “modern” but still vintage specifications, sometimes involving screen-scraping a green screen mainframe terminal, wrapped in XML and sent over the internet. Anyway, point is I couldn’t agree more about stories.