Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!pucc!EGNILGES
From: EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: C source lines in file
Message-ID: <9363@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 18 Aug 89 20:57:22 GMT
References: <35120@ccicpg.UUCP> <16018@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> <895@mrsvr.UUCP>
Reply-To: EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 27
Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article

In article <895@mrsvr.UUCP>, hallett@shoreland.uucp (Jeff Hallett x4-6328) writes:

>In article <16018@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
>>swonk@ccicpg.UUCP (Glen Swonk) writes:
>>> Does anyone have a program or a method of determing
>>> the number of C source lines in a source file?

Turns out this unambiguous measure is ambiguous.  I modified a compiler
a while back to take comments out of its count of source lines.  I
ended up counting, not "lines" (which is an incoherent concept in any
language which allows multiple statements per line or multiple lines
per statement) but syntactical "statements".  That meant that in the
following code

     DO while foo
        foo := bar+1
     END

there are three lines but two statements, one of which is contained
in the other!  I believe that this is the best of a not too good
collection of complexity measures.

************************************************************************

Edward Nilges

"If the universe were perfect, it wouldn't exist" - Yogi Berra