Overview Core Dump - Work In Progress Episode 56 January 29, 1998 : Number of program lines, and an explanation. I read this "work in progress" clone from Paragon, and they reported the "number of lines" that the program was at the moment. I liked that, somehow. "Code length : 3736 lines", it said. But you've got to be careful with such numbers. Do they include comment lines? Do they include empty lines? Also, some procedures might be copied into several files, but that isn't very good coding. One should use included or linked files for that. Personally, I don't work with too many comments, and if I do include them, I place them to the right of the actual code (which means they aren't counted separately in a line count). I do use empty lines, to make the structure of the program more clear. I use include files for everything else. Anyway, I wanted to count too. Getting out TED and writing everything down ("go to end of document; note line number; load next document") wasn't an option. There are a whole load of files involved in Core Dump. (I didn't count the code of custom editors I wrote especially for Core Dump; I guess I could have counted that too.) So I wrote a little program that counts the number of lines in more or less the same way TED does: counting CR/LF codes. I guess this is a fair measurement, considering I don't include many separate comment lines. Anyway, the results are: Number of lines: 44.376 Now that's what I call a number. And it'll be increasing too, before the game is finished. Anyone for some more line-counts? Go on... Read the previous entry