source code size metric: Python and modern C++

[Anton Vredegoor]

On 1 Dec 2002 18:09:28 -0800, pavel_vozenilek at yahoo.co.uk (Pavel
Vozenilek) wrote:

>I will be glad to get info/links on this single metric, without going
>into "who is better" discussion, please. I know the answer is _more_
>complicated than single number and am curious on practical experience.

Nice try, but I trust you didn't really expect to get away with
stating the metric to be useless and still insist on practical
experience? :-) In my opinion what counts is to be able to quickly
produce working code, understand the code someone else wrote - or for
that matter ones own code a year later - and to be able to quickly
adapt code to fit some closely related task. Simplicity\elegance of
the code as expressed by number of lines used is a somewhat related
issue, but this is not easily measured because for example since
Python is written in C one could decide that any Python program is
just some very clumsy way of writing the same thing in C! A better way
would be to measure how many different C programs are expressed by  a
group of Python scripts, but this might be even more like counting how
many angels fit on the head of a needle.

Regards,
	Anton.