On Friday 02 November 2007 19:03, Isaac Gouy wrote:
It's slightly interesting that, while we're happily opining about LOCs and gz, no one has even tried to show that switching from LOCs to gz made a big difference in those "program bulk" rankings, or even provided a specific example that they feel shows how gz is misrepresentative - all opinion, no data.
Why gzip and not run-length encoding, Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, block sorting, PPM etc.? Choosing gzip is completely subjective and there is no logical reason to think that gzipped byte count reflects anything of interest. Why waste any time studying results in such an insanely stupid metric? Best case you'll end up concluding that the added complexity had no adverse effect on the results. In contrast, LOC has obvious objective merits: it reflects the amount of code the developer wrote and the amount of code the developer can see whilst reading code. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e