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From: ksh@ai.mit.edu (K. Shane Hartman)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: WANTED: "C" code line counter program
Message-ID: <KSH.91Mar14062941@august-east.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 91 11:29:41 GMT
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In-reply-to: cml@tove.cs.umd.edu's message of 12 Mar 91 17:29:21 GMT


>For example, someone has quoted numbers from Japanese software companies.
>I am told that these folks usually report their numbers in assembler
>equivalent lines - what size they believe their program would be in assembler.
>This is ok, I guess, if you have an assembler available beneath your compiler
>(like C) but who knows what they did for other environments?

Counting assembler equivalents is useless given optimizing compilers
of varying abilities.  Better (functional) metrics such as function
points and feature points have been around for a while.  Functional
metrics can be applied to 'languages' which have no lines of code
(code generation from design diagrams for example).

-[Shane]->