[Shootout-list] Re: Optimizing for speed vs. beauty

[Bengt Kleberg]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
...deleted
> 
> Well, I'm of the camp that LOC is a big, ancient lie.  For instance, all
> of the ASM code I've ever written professionally has had lotsa extra
> LOCs just to keep things clear.  And so did the C code which preceeded
> it, so that the compiler generated ASM code would stand a chance of
> being what I wanted, without having to do it all by hand.  Extra LOC was
> clearly the most 'beautiful' way to handle my class of low-level
> problems.  Yet I imagine some HLL guy would just make vampire cross

1 if you mean that you have to write comments to explain what you are 
doing, then comments are not counted as lines of code. as an aside i 
find this to be wrong. they should be since some langauages needs lots 
of comments, while others do not.

2 the number of bugs per LOC is about constant for all languages 
(atleast this was the case when i partook in a course on safeware about 
5 years ago). therefore one might want a low LOC count per program.

3 it is possible to ''cheat'' by having artificially long lines. those 
''cheats'' are not of interest for this discussion.


bengt