throwaway

I frequently write throwaway code (in a research environment ) - for example to explore an algorithm or a model for a scientific property or process. Many of these "experiments" are one-off but sometimes I find that I need to use a few later. For example I have just unearthed code for string matching I wrote 7 years ago (stopped because of other priorities) but which is now valuable for a coworker's project. Having looked at it (did I really write such impenetrable code?) I realise there are some things I could have done then to help me when I restarted the "project" ("experiment" is still a