On Friday 02 November 2007 23:53, Isaac Gouy wrote:
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.
Why would you want to subjectively "correct" for "bias" in favour of long lines?
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"?
That is not an argument in favour of needlessly adding extra complexity and adopting a practically-irrelevant metric. Why not use the byte count of a PNG encoding of a photograph of the source code written out by hand in blue ballpoint pen? -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e