Re: Clair Grant on VMS code base

On 4/16/2025 9:29 PM, Dan Cross wrote:

In article <67fee5b8$0$708$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>,
Arne Vajhøj  <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

There is no question that it is most accurate to only
count the continued line as one in your example.
>
But I suspect that a lot of LOC counters just count
non-blank and non-comment.
>
Anything else requires language knowledge.
>
And while it for Fortran, Basic, Macro-32 may be relative
simple, then for other languages it can become more tricky.
>
Let us take 4 times Pascal:
>
if a = 1 then b := 2 else b := 3;
>
if a = 1 then
    b := 2
else
    b := 3;
>
if a = 1 then begin
    b := 2;
end else begin
    b := 3;
end;
>
if a = 1 then
begin
    b := 2;
end
else
begin
    b := 3;
end;
>
How many lines? I would say that the most correct is 3 in
all 4 cases. But coding the line counter to return that
would require it to have Pascal knowledge.
>
And what about the fluent style that are so modern?
>
o = f.create();
o.add(1);
o.add(2);
o.add(3);
>
o = f.create()
      .add(1)
      .add(2)
      .add(3);
>
o = f.create().add(1).add(2).add(3);
>
1 1 1 or 4 1 1 or 4 4 1 or 4 4 4??
>
So I think counters go for the simple approach and assume
that for large code bases with many developers then total
converge towards an "average" style.

 Most modern code-counting tools _are_ language aware.  Whether
they do a better or worse job for each given language may be a
matter of debate, but most at least recognize different
languages and have some knowledge of their semantics.
 Cf, https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei?tab=readme-ov-file
https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc?tab=readme-ov-file#recognized-languages-
https://github.com/boyter/scc/blob/master/LANGUAGES.md
 etc.

Their language awareness consist of recognizing comments.
They are examples of some of those tools that simply count
non-blank non-comment lines.
(SCC also know some keywords but that is used for complexity
calculation not for line counting)
C:\Work>type demo.c
// C demo
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
     int a[] = {
         1,
         2,
         3
     };
     printf("%d %d %d\n",
         a[0],
         a[1],
         a[2]);
     return 0;
}
C:\Work>cloc-1.96 demo.c
        1 text file.
        1 unique file.
        0 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.96  T=0.01 s (67.5 files/s, 1147.0 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment    code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                                1              2              1      14
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C:\Work>scc demo.c
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Language                 Files     Lines   Blanks  Comments     Code Complexity
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
C                            1        17        2         1       14       0
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Total                        1        17        2         1       14       0
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $305
Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 0.63 months
Estimated People Required (organic) 0.04
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Processed 200 bytes, 0.000 megabytes (SI)
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
C:\Work>tokei-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc demo.c
===============================================================================
  Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments Blanks
===============================================================================
  C                       1           17           14            1       2
===============================================================================
  Total                   1           17           14            1       2
===============================================================================
Arne