[Shootout-list] Re: Total Characters vs Lines of Code

[Peter Hinely]

Hi,

> It looks like some of the programs submitted work harder
> than others to optimize the "lines of code" metric. I think
> it would be more useful to use total characters to avoid
> giving an advantage to code that squashes everything onto
> fewer lines for no good reason.

I don't think I like that idea. It would penalize languages that have
more verbose (and in some people's opinion a more readable) style.

Maybe what we really want is some measure of the number of tokens of an
entry, but it's not practical to implement.  I think lines of code, while
a crude measure, may be hard to improve on.

Regards,
Peter