Re: Proposal: Proposals are the wrong approach [prose and long]

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@gmail.com> wrote:
> Similar problem, people using "Lines of code" as measurement of complexity.
> Why do you need to do this? This is what results ins so ugly condensed code.
> If you need some kind of rule of thumb, use amount of tokens.

There are better measures, that count the number of branches and so
forth, but we do get stuck on simple measures of bigness.  Leaving out
blank lines to make the program 'smaller' seems very naive, and you
get program text without paragraphs or breathing-spaces.

It's a matter of taste how vertically compact code should be.   People
get surprisingly upset about where to put the curly-bracket, and to my
eyes most Java code looks like it has far too much vertical
whitespace.  A suitably intelligent environment could present code in
the desired style, but it's a hard problem because we like The Source
to be good old text.

Fortunately, there are few arguments about how to format Lua code ;)