Not really. It's a useful metric- at least it would be if they implemented it properly. Gives you a ball park figure of how complex a project is.

It doesn't. I fully agree with WozNZ

Reminds me... back in the days when i was in uni, after a course work was accessed i read a feedback note from the tutor which says something like "if i didn't know what the course work was about i would have thought your code was implementing a space rocket" When i checked the code of some guy who got near perfect score i realised what the feedback meant. His code was about 1/20th the size of mine because it had more intelligent algorithms and thus more compact. Since then i always strive to make my code smarter (also creating better functionalities) and never took huge lines of code to indicate more complexity.

Of course no matter how smart your algorithms are, it will still grow in size for large projects.

So, multiply line count with the IQ of the author?

Well said, but it was due me being naive rather than low IQ, because i learnt my lesson and took it to heart after that assessment and my scores improved significantly

Yes, but being off by a factor of 1.1 is better than being off by a factor of 2.

Say you've got a laser which can tell you if an object's distance from you is within 5 brackets: larger than 1m, 1m to 10cm, 10cm to 1cm, 1cm to 1mm, or less than 1mm. Most of the time, if you double the distance of the object, you'll still get the same result from the laser because it takes a factor of 10 (not 2) to jump between brackets.

LOC is quite similar, most of the time you're categorizing projects based on the log10 of the LOC value, not the log2 :)

Counting the semicolons instead of newlines is also prone to inaccuracies, as people have mentioned above. Comments can be a crucial part of the code, vital for maintainers to read and understand, just like any other part of the code - semicolon count ignores them. Many code constructs are quite complex but don't use any or many semi-colons -- macro-based code-generation, lambdas, functions, etc... Other simple constructs are semi-colon heavy, such as for-loops (2) vs while loops (0). Style can also influence the count -- some people use commas to declare multiple variables at once, whereas other people declare one per line.

I've also seen some projects that use an 80-character section delimiter in their code made up of semicolons :lol:

/*;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;*/

It would actually be mildly interesting to perform different "LOC" metrics (such as semicolon count) for a large selection of different projects and see how the metrics vary. You could find out if there's a correlation between semicolons and lines in general, or if the relationship varies randomly from project to project. Maybe you could even use relationships between different metrics as a guess to the style of the code :)