on Friday, May 19, 2006 11:26 PM [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | All I would ask is what objective evidence does either of actually | have? How can you know? What is a fair way to even count line | numbers? From there how do we begin to objectively measure software | quality? That's why this discussion interests me, and why I don't | understand why you are so adamant it doesn't work. I'll agree that I | have never seen line count/char count type data used for anything other | than marketing swill and kitty litter. Doesn't mean it can't be used. | But first things first... and this one I think is solvable - their has | got to be an equitable way to count how much code was written - maybe | it isn't lines maybe it is. In truth, since you are so opposed to the | idea, I'd be curious if you can think of a way to measure the quantity | of code objectively? ANd that's it - not can we make a qualitative | statement beyond that. But simply can we quanitfy the amount of code | in some fashion that allows a reasonable comparison?
This is a difficult question - one way to measure - more or less objectively - is to somehow figure out how many machine instructions (on some "standard" machine - Turing?) would be generated by the code.... Even that won't tell us much - cos it will favour inline code as somehow "heavier" than looping code... Now we know that inline code is faster on most machines, and looping code is more compact, - so how to say what is best? And this only covers what you computer scientists call the "procedures" or "methods" - the actual instructions that are executed by the machine - how is the memory space used to be measured and factored in? - and the running stack space needed? - specially in the case of recursions.... And then how do you handle an interpreted language vs a compliled language - do you count the machine instructions of the interpreter, or only the ones actually executed? - and the memory consumed by the interpreter?..... - And if you count the interpreter, why not the compiler?... Not simple, not easy - in fact it's a minefield.... - Hendrik van Rooyen -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list