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From: dlee@pallas.athenanet.com (Doug Lee)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.wanted,comp.sources.wanted,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: WANTED: "C" code line counter program
Summary: Two more ideas, but what is a "line" here?
Message-ID: <1031@pallas.athenanet.com>
Date: 14 Mar 91 06:37:21 GMT
References: <1991Mar6.214157.18633@ntpal.uucp> <1991Mar11.182848.26693@comm.wang.com> <dcda02id05Q.01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com>
Lines: 29

In article <dcda02id05Q.01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com> cpm00@DUTS.ccc.amdahl.com (PUT YOUR NAME HERE) writes:
>What about counting newlines, but ignoring those
>that immediately follow another newline (ie, skip blank lines)?

My first thought was to skip all comments (single- and multi-line) and then
count only lines containing characters other than whitespace.  This should
be close, though it will still overcount on constructs like
    if (( <long_condition_1> ) ||
        ( <long_condition_2> ) ||
        ... )
Then again, maybe a line that long *should* count as more than one line.  We
also run into the somewhat common declaration syntax
    char *
    foo()
which, by my method, counts as two lines.

Unfortunately, I see no quick way to give a consistent line count regardless
of program syntax.  Counting lines ending in '{' or ';' (after removing
comments and trailing whitespace) would catch most loops and function
definitions without counting them more than once, but constructs like
    while (line = get_next_line(file))
        (void) process_line(line);
would still count only once unless the braces were included (not a bad idea,
imho).  We need a more precise definition of "line" for this, I fear.

Does this remind anyone else of _The Mythical Man Month_?  :-)

-- 
Doug Lee  (dlee@athenanet.com or {bradley,uunet}!pallas!dlee)