On Friday 02 November 2007 20:29, Isaac Gouy wrote:
...obviously LOC doesn't tell you anything about how much stuff is on each line, so it doesn't tell you about the amount of code that was written or the amount of code the developer can see whilst reading code.
Code is almost ubiquitously visualized as a long vertical strip. The width is limited by your screen. Code is then read by scrolling vertically. This is why LOC is a relevant measure: because the area of the code is given by LOC * screen width and is largely unrelated to the subjective "amount of stuff on each line". As you say, imperative languages like C are often formatted such that a lot of right-hand screen real estate is wasted. LOC penalizes such wastage. The same cannot be said for gzipped bytes, which is an entirely irrelevant metric... -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e