Re: Counting lines of C code

[BrowserUk]

Not that the point really needs reenforcing any, but the story might amuse.

A few (more..) years ago whilst contracting at a large azure company, a bean counter somewhere started recording "kloc metrics". Through an accident of mixed up mailing lists, one of 'us' became aware what some of 'them' were doing, and for some strange reason, a relatively small group of 'us' starting harmonising our comment block style on the rather obscure

/*;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
   This bit should be reasonably self explanitory
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;*/

which was nice, but soon became passé...and had to become

//;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
//  this bits quite important
//;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

but again this went out of vogue as the fashion police became cleverer at detecting fakes so

{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};
// Not sure about this bit
{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};

This cycle-of-fashion ran on for a while until the edict came down from on high

Thou shalt not use extranious semi-colons in C code

The challenge then for the top couturiers was to see who could write the longest single, valid, line of c code.

Of course, the comma operator came into its own for this.

Interestingly, my very first sight of a Perl program (deftly moving the subject back on-topic:), was a 300+ line Perl/CGI script of which about 200 lines was a single, poetry-mode, print statement producing a (near) static table in html.

I knew then that I was going to like Perl...albeit that it was one ugly piece of code.