I was just wondering why some projects report such inflated figures for lines of code (google have claimed to have writen a billion lines of code)
I downloaded a tool called cloc and discovered that it automatically doubled the amount of code in my project (c++) - normally, I just search for ";" - a much easier way to do it.
It looks like to me that they are counting everything that isn't a comment and isn't white space as a line of code. A single open curly brace gets counted as an entire line of code. This is obviously wrong. If you format your code for readability you will double the lines of code, compared to some one who writes code in a more compact style - even though it's essentially the same code.
Also, every file gets counted, no mater what it is, stuff auto-generated by the IDE and even html files get counted.