[Shootout-list] LOC

[Brian Hurt]

Having been around this rollercoaster ride before...

On Sun, 1 May 2005, Jon Harrop wrote:

> For example, instead of writing:
>
>  if (i == 0)
>  {
>    j += 1;
>  }
>
> I'd write:
>
>  if (i == 0) ++j;

In my day-to-day C coding, I prefer the former to the latter.  It makes it 
much easier to slip in debugging statements, like:
     if (i == 0)
     {
         printf("Hey, i==0!\n");
         j += 1;
     }

It also prevents errors of the form:
     if (x == 7)
         if (i == 0) j += 1;
     else
         ...

But that's me.

> If the counter argument is that LOC is trying to measure the amount of typing
> then shouldn't we be measuring bytes instead of lines?

Because then tabbing becomes important.  The problem with non-space bytes 
is that variable names become important.  Although non-space bytes 
wouldn't be a bad measure (and fairly easy to implement).

> in OCaml. However, many programs (such as OCaml's harmonic) split definitions
> across multiple lines, which is unusual in OCaml programming. I suspect this
> is simply a case of asking authors to change their coding style.

Especially in Ocaml's case, where:
 	let x, y = 1, foo x in
means something different than:
 	let x = 1
 	and y = foo x
 	in

Specifically, in the former, a tuple is actually allocated and then 
pattern matched against.

Brian