--- Sebastian Sylvan
It still tells you how much content you can see on a given amount of vertical space.
And why would we care about that? :-)
I think the point, however, is that while LOC is not perfect, gzip is worse.
How do you know?
Best case you'll end up concluding that the added complexity had no adverse effect on the results.
Best case would be seeing that the results were corrected against bias in favour of long-lines, and ranked programs in a way that looks-right when we look at the program source code side-by-side.
It's completely arbitrary and favours languages wich requires you to write tons of book keeping (semantic noise) as it will compress down all that redundancy quite a bit (while the programmer would still has to write it, and maintain it). So gzip is even less useful than LOC, as it actively *hides* the very thing you're trying to meassure! You might as well remove it alltogether.
I don't think you've looked at any of the gz rankings, or compared the source code for any of the programs :-)
Or, as has been suggested, count the number of words in the program. Again, not perfect (it's possible in some languages to write things which has no whitespace, but is still lots of tokens).
Wouldn't that be "completely arbitrary"? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com