As I understand it, the question is what you want to measure for. gzip is actually pretty good at, precisely because it removes boilerplate, reducing programs to something approximating their complexity. So a higher gzipped size means, at some level, a more complicated algorithm (in the case, maybe, of lower level languages, because there's complexity that's not lifted to the compiler). LOC per language, as I understand it, has been somewhat called into question as a measure of productivity, but there's still a correlation between programmers and LOC across languages even if it wasn't as strong as thought -- on the other hand, bugs per LOC seems to have been fairly strongly debunked as something constant across languages. If you want a measure of the language as a language, I guess LOC/gzipped is a good ratio for how much "noise" it introduces -- but if you want to measure just pure speed across similar algorithmic implementations, which, as I understand it, is what the shootout is all about, then gzipped actually tends to make some sense. --S