On Friday 18 June 2004 18:45, Brian Hurt wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Sebastien Ferre wrote:
> > What about counting characters instead (counting several spaces in
> > a row as only one character) ? As most languages just don't mind
> > where you cut the lines, this seems to me a more fair measure.
> > Also, this would give complete freedom on the indentation style
> > without resulting in any disadvantage for the language rank.
> >
> > Just a suggestion :)
>
> Actually, the idea I like is to pick a standard compression algorithm- say
> gzip, or bzip2- and compress the files.  This actually gives you a decent
> approximation of the amount of information the soure code contains- and
> entire sidesteps a lot of issues.  In addition to newlines and indenting,
> it also minimizes the effect of variable name length.  For example, the
> average name length for ocaml programs is probably a lot shorter than the
> average name length for java programs.

A note. This is an approximation of kolmogorov complexity which is regarded as 
a universal measure of information content. In recent research, it was 
observed that statistical compressors (PPM) do a little better than bzip2 in 
terms of discriminatory power (ie. information distance).

Best Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara  KDE Project: http://www.kde.org
http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://malfunct.iuma.com
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B  EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C

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