New media New comments Search media. Also read how to create a Text file, Open and Read: File Handling. Our IDE tells us how many lines of text a file has and displays a count in one of the margins. You could have 1000 very small files with < 300 lines or 100 larger files with 3000 lines. òdI^îAC}q&I§ÏŠ)÷j×Ê\ƒµxA{2ŸDòÉ @WŸ\´õbn®K‘/sµ] Ôv5Þ8. But some work requires writing 500 to 1000 lines. I suppose you'd quickly realise that this student's solution was... sub-optimal... if you asked them how many lines when they presented their project. Even looking for outliers is throught with dangers. The brain can only effectively process so much information at a time; beyond 400 LOC, the ability to find defects diminishes. LoC can be useful for spotting really badly wrong solutions, but setting 'targets' with it can be harmful. Her question was normally: Now come to the code.. Our goal with code should be to write 300 lines of clean code. Often you could find bugs by examining these parts of the code. You could find parts of the code that were un-usual. Before asking anything else, the very first question she asked from every student was: "How many lines does your code have?". If the line count is way off then it is a sign of a problem. How many lines of code are there in Windows? orders of magnitude away from what is expected), lines of code aren't a good indicator of whether a project is good or bad. The American teletypewriters could type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70 CPL. It's a whole new world up here! 2There's a bit of a lie-to-children here, if you're not paying attention. Usage: lines [directory] $ lines Found 562 lines of text in . By comparison, the Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code. However, the console shows a large file list, then 150017 total, then again a large file list and then 38491 total.Somehow, the result is divided into several bins but I cannot figure out why. Variables are short, each line is crammed with as many instructions as possible, etc. “But what about Jane?” I said. It helped us find bugs. Just an interesting fact to know, how many lines of code are there, devs? Files should not have too many lines of code "System. This is the only one that would make any sense, but people do a lot of thinks that don't make sense. Less lines of code does not always mean more efficient. An illustration depicts how many lines of code have been written to create the software and services. It only takes seconds to count the LOC in a project. Lets say the lab manual has about 30 lines for the bubble sort implementation. Please show some significant part of the code and explain it to me. “Terrific,” I mumbled respectfully. Output: Total number of lines are: 2 Explanation. In the programming industry I have noticed an odd trend among certain programmers that go through great lengths to make their code as terse as possible. Most importantly, we have no information about what she did as a result of the opening question. P.S: While I am neither in favour nor against this question but I have been coding since 2009/10 and my personal experience reminds me that I still don't remember the lines of code for even my own freelancing softwares (even for my thesis program - by don't remembering I mean I even don't remember whether it was 1200 lines or 1800 lines). Wait a minute! The numbers they gave weren't a goal for the project, but only a source of reflection at the end. lost , Oct 20, 2005 mcfox Wind Maker I got the picture clearly. A shame. It's part preference, part performance. You can also count number of line on piped output. “Jane came to us with a great reputation. In practice, a review of 200-400 LOC over 60 to 90 minutes should yield 70-90% defect discovery. Home. 1You might also know a variant of this as the ROT13 cipher where the shift is 13. If our student was really clever and wanted to implement that in Python 2, they could have just written input().encode('rot13'). 100 lines of Perl will probably accomplish a lot more than 100 lines of C. So you have to be careful that you're really comparing apples to apples. 4) is it modular: resusable, logically broken into functions/methods with appropriate names for funcs/methods and variables, 5) Is the documentation adequate (docstring/header, method docs, comments only where appropriate). The results of applying these tools to 2008's Fedora 9 Linux came out to a total of 204,500,946 physical SLOC (Source Lines of Code) and a cost of $10,784,484,309. Not a 20 lines exercise for which an interview with each student is a waste of time. I've even written console apps in notepad, and compiled from the command line with more lines than that, because I thought they were so small they didn't need a whole .sln and .proj file, and yet here is 37signals going live with a product that is just 579 lines of Ruby. Other than that, I cannot imagine how this question really helps much with anything. Finally after file has reached end increment words and lines count by one if total characters > 0 to make sure you count last word and line. I said "if it was spread about, then the metrics would not find it, ..." he interrupted "then spread it about". Ð[ÝõëÝí­MÚØtì.v¶Ò`—0ïræÃüƒýöûj§¬Ìxåïÿ\Ý#­ü/©gašO©X2aÒD„¾nÊÄ­ƒL,soÒ1v+µ7äªÜ[Õ[ócUtüU-ß[ÏÏ××zÞØ By asking a 'harmless' question which has no right answer, it makes the rest of the questions much easier to pitch. It showed that a module, that I had written had a complexity for class dependency that was off the chart. Because they knew how many line it should take, and they were looking for statistical outliers. $ lines test-project Found 2287 lines of text in test-project/ ##Installing Lines. 3) Has it followed the correct conventions? Maybe she was going on the assumption that the students would need a minimum number of lines of code to solve the problem. This tool will return the number of lines detected in a text. I continued "... but then the code would be much more complex." That's not how character encodings work in reality (there's an offset in ASCII before you get to the capital letters), but it's not relevant for the example. -- He looked at me blackly. Please change value with your actual file name and it will return number of lines in a file as output. When I was an university, there was a myth that some lazy teachers (I don't know the technical terms for the roles), would weigh your reports, and give a grade base on that. How it works. We can also use –lines in place of -l as command line switch. Using regular expressions may be pretty cool, but can make it very difficult to read for anyone that has to do maintenance on the code, or even to understand. He screamed, "but what about this one". Number of lines: 1. Did you know? It was a good tool, and very useful. Let our data-visualization program your brain. My current project has more lines of configuration than that. https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3351#3351, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/6275#6275, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/6284#6284. We've given her a few problems that we Students of the Code.org tutorials (Code Studio) have written 24,705,279,321 lines of code.Is this a lot? monster flowchart. And we don't know anything about how the teacher intended to use the answer. Over complex code is bad, see in working out the final grade, the number of lines of code, goes some ware in the denominator. It was a good tool. As developers, we want to write "Lord of The Rings". Menu. Of course the simple line of code check doesn't catch either of these situations, there are automatic ways of trying to detect code quality but they are much more complex and subjective. New posts New media New media comments New resources New profile posts Latest activity. If you're aware of it, you'll know that it can be trivially solved by using modular arithmetic2: One student submitted a solution to that function with 1382 lines.3. I disappointingly found that a lot of extensions, such as “.c”, are not included in the list of file extensions that should have their number of lines counted. Facebook? Latest reviews Search resources. This program correctly counts the correct amount of lines of text if I use the . While the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of code across 40,000 software files, Google engineers modify 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files each week. On the other hand, a common mistake made by novice programmers is to write a routine, then copy and paste it and make a few small changes to it. Resources. How many lines of code? So yes lines of code can be useful, but only as a statistical tool. 0 = A, 1 = B). After you open it for the first time you my want to go to the Options -> Preferences and add all the extensions you typically write code in. 3I cheated and calculated the amount of lines you'd use from that approach, rather than actually writing the whole thing and counting the lines. Programs like this would have far fewer lines of code than average but be of poor quality. I heard of one student that handed in some work with a load of blank paper attached, and got a good grade. I remember a story by Michael Jackson, about judging how brilliant some one is. And expected to be widely divergent from the earlier estimate, of course, since this was their first attempt. out they weren't really difficult at all. This is a sample file to get line numbers from the file. Write multiple lines in a text file and read the file : ----- Input the number of lines to be written : 4 :: The lines are :: test line 1 test line 2 test line 3 test line 4 The content of the file test.txt is : test line 1 test line 2 test line 3 test line 4 Flowchart: C Programming Code Editor: For one thing, different languages vary widely in the number of lines of code they produce. Nothing special happening in the files listed around the first XXXX total.. Google leads the list with staggering 2,000,000,000 lines of code. Thank you! It’s a useful metric to have: a quick way to see how long a given method is or object has. Files using ASCII (in Python 2) or UTF-8 (in Python 3) should not have an encoding declaration. Some constructs such as "comprehensions", streams, lambdas or map/reduce allow you to pack a lot of complexity into a few lines. If you can define 'worth asking', this question would be better. Fred Its the same concept as in reports. very good. As others have noted, the simple lines of code doesn't always have a lot of meaning in terms of the project's quality. This program will open a file and read the file’s content character by character and finally return the total number of lines in the file. So I need to know how important this question is and is it really worth asking the nervous students who have just arrived to present their full projects rather than a routine programming assignment? This question was prompted by observing a faculty member in projects evaluation. Faster than asking. when we apply this code the output will be like: hello i am Raj Gaurav hello i am Raj Gaurav2 number of lines : 2. My guess is that the question is primarily intended to catch the outliers, those projects with a lot less or more code than average. The first wrong way sounds a lot like APL, which results in write-only coding. This has the convenient property of being self-inverse, so you don't need to subtract to decrypt in a separate function. The scenario here doesn't really give much context for the evaluator's question. New posts Search forums. It is perfectly possible that this opening was a hidden request for context - is the presenter actually familiar with the code or just doing the PR part of the project? Even looking for outliers is throught with dangers. Using publicly available data, I’ve compiled the following chart to compare the lines of code (LOC) that Google claims to have, versus those in other well-known pieces of software. The point is starting an interview with a nervous student, about a project of some size. What you should aim for is code without unnecessary complexity, not a certain maximum line count. I also tried piping into a file like @funilrys did it, but the output was the same what I mean?”. Program to count characters, words and lines in a file /** * C program to count number of characters, words and lines in a text file. To count the number of lines we will check the available Newline (\n) characters. A few years back, when I was a software engineer. Description: Running the FIND command with option /v and empty search string will find all lines Running the FIND command with option /c will output the line count only. A few years back, when I was a software engineer. I am reminded of the joke Abraham Lincoln told: ", https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3344#3344, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3345#3345, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3352#3352. E.g. In any case, I could not count lines of code. Before opening it, tell me how many lines does it have? Š~¸ªoUöúöÖvmÚ󝆲—Ôým I'm surprised that you didn't ask this teacher why she asked this question and how it fits into her overall evaluation. Following command will count number of lines in /etc/passwd files and print on terminal. iPhone apps? Forums. Equally, treating a higher LoC measurement as a better project is a bad idea. Restructuring and refactoring code can be tricky and time consuming and when programmers get in a hurry they sometimes just copy paste. We can speculate on situations in which it might be a good question and we can speculate on situations in which it might be a terrible question, but we can't know unless we know why it was asked. The most direct way to count lines of code (LOC) is to, well, count lines of code. We thought she was going to be as brilliant as Fred. My personal preference is to create a symbolic link between lines and /usr/bin/lines. No difference, except in … Until we get a … I don't think anyone can answer this question without more information. The barcode has a long and interesting history from its initial development nearly 70 years ago through today. “I thought Jane was This results in code that takes up the minimum of space but is often hard for humans to interpret, as if the programmer forgets that humans look at code as often as computers do. … Summary. But she hasn't I have, myself, asked students at the beginning of a project to tell me how big their self-defined project will be using various measures. File and line lengths are measurements of secondary effects of complexity and as such are highly variable. The limit of the line length in 70–80 characters may well have originated from various technical limitations of various equipment. thought were going to be really tough, but when she finished it turned It told us what the probably bug density is, if you knew how to read it. I pointed out, that this class was a factory, it was its job to own this complexity, because it would be worse to have it spread about. Click here to upload your image However it did not tell us where the bugs were. (out/err)" should not be used to log messages; Overriding virtual functions should not change parameter defaults; Starting with the subject, such as "Files", will ensure that all rules applying to files will be grouped together. If she assumes someone would need to write at least 200 lines of code and their answer to the question is "20" then maybe she wants to look at their code more closely. One response to “Count the number of lines in a text file … and introspection began. One day the head of QA came to me, screaming. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Service. She hasn't really proved herself yet — if you see Unless the code is extraordinarily long or short (i.e. Moreover, you don't say how accurate the teacher expected the answer to be. Programs like this would have far more lines of code than average but be of poor quality. So now you can see the merits of using code length to spot solutions that are over 250x longer than necessary. I will include the last 3 paragraphs here. In any case, I could not count lines of code. That code assumes that all the letters you want to encode are encoded from 0 to 25 (e.g. pretty simple. There is no right answer here. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy, 2020 Stack Exchange, Inc. user contributions under cc by-sa. as Frankenstein, Fred the brilliant creator of the uncontrollable Spacing, layout, indentation etc. I pointed out that all the other complexity metrics were close to zero. I'd hope you remember the difference between 50 LOC and 50k though... Was she asking them to come up with a figure from memory, or did they have a computer with the source code in front of them? It gives us an ongoing indicator as to when things might need to be broken down into smaller parts or refactored a bit. That’s 14x the length of War and Peace. If the line count is way off then it is a sign of a problem. A SmartBear study of a Cisco Systems programming team revealed that developers should review no more than 200 to 400 lines of code (LOC) at a time. Did you know that the end line character is different based on the operating system: Unix, Linux, Mac OS X LF (\n) character is used (0x0A) Mac OS up to 9 https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3342#3342, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3359#3359, Computer Science Educators Stack Exchange. Is a million lines of code a lot? It measured Mccabe complexity (various complexities of the code). regex can be readable. Some one introduced a software metrics tool. Example. Media. Do let me know in the comments section if you have any doubts. @Gilles She was asking them to answer it precisely to the .. say 673 lines of code and they had a computer with source code in it but this question was asked during project evaluation. What's new. Asking for the length directly is probably pointless—instead, just take a look at that when you review the code and mark it. Hopefully, students are writing clear, maintainable code, not playing code golf, so a longer, explicit solution may actually be better. If you do that, you're encouraging unnecessarily verbose solutions, like our student who wrote 1400 lines for a 5 line problem. Chances are we have a feel for when things are getting too long, but seeing an ongoing count on the side of the screen often helps. So I have a file that has seven lines of text and I have to count them. Unless the student is some kind of an expert already, lines of code will be a easy way to filter out those who have no idea what they are doing. Long files tend to indicate that methods, subroutines or classes are overly complex (doing too many things, not sufficiently factored, etc) Faculties will ask you to write 2 pages, but what if the content only merits 1 page or 4? (max 2 MiB). The FOR command with option /f will parse the output, the line count in this case, and the set command put the line … If you break them up. I've heard of one example where some students were set the task of creating a Caesar cipher1 program. So at the end, such a question would be completely natural and expected. That sounds especially stupid until you know that my only goal was to get them to start to think about estimation, which they had never done. We stopped using the tool shortly after that. Most of them turned out He was waving a bit of paper with the results of the tests. But when the difference is much smaller, why bother using lines as an indicator of anything? A million lines of code, if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text. count total number of lines in several files: xushi: Programming: 5: 11-12-2005 05:42 PM: command to count how many lines in a file? So the point is not the factual information by itself. You can also provide a link from the web. Lots of separate bits that you join together. Sometimes called "copy pasta" this is a poor programming practice because it results in code that is redundant and the same bug can appear in many places in the code. I have a really long line of code and i was wondering what the syntax is so that i could have it on multiple lines, for easier readibility. Its just another way of valuation. She picked up the program design ideas very fast.”, “Yes,” said the DP Manager. I agree with the other posters here: using num LoC as an indicator is a very poor assessment of the code. ±¾Õíîl¿x¾½qÞd Some of the other answers here provide such speculation. wc -l /etc/passwd . Leaving out exceptionally talented students, most students would have at least 30 lines, and if they don't they probably haven't written the code. really proved herself yet. There is nothing worse when doing an interview than asking an opening question which your student doesn't understand well enough even to be able to guess the answer. Because they knew how many line it should take, and they were looking for statistical outliers. Why does the number of lines in the project matter all that much? Also read how to find total words in a string. as the delimiter but I tried it with the \n and it would always return as 0. Make any sense, but people do a lot Open and read: Handling... Me how many lines of code ( LOC ) is to create a.... Limitations of various equipment click here to upload your image ( max 2 MiB.. By comparison, the Microsoft Windows operating system how many lines of code should a file have roughly 50 million lines of text if I use the lengths! Might also know a variant of this as the ROT13 cipher where bugs. The problem not paying attention by itself printed, would be about 18,000 pages of in! Effectively process so much information at a time ; beyond 400 LOC, the ability to total! Is extraordinarily long or short ( i.e XXXX total property of being self-inverse, you... One response to “Count the number of lines of code, just take look! Do a lot has about 30 lines for a 5 line problem divergent from the web % defect.! Sometimes just copy paste told us what the probably bug density is if! Separate function possible, etc > value with your actual file name and it would return... Is a waste of time a quick way to see how long a given method is or object.. 200-400 LOC over 60 to 90 minutes should yield 70-90 % defect.. Want to write `` Lord of the uncontrollable monster flowchart set the task creating... A goal for the project, but people do a lot a lines! One '' of paper with the \n and it will return the number lines! Up the program design ideas very fast. ”, “ Yes, ” said the Manager. Difference is much smaller, why bother using lines as an indicator of anything you did ask... Minutes should yield 70-90 % defect discovery have originated from various technical limitations various., each line is crammed with as many instructions as possible, etc line are.: file Handling defects diminishes displays a count in one of the Rings '' and! 'M surprised that you did n't ask this teacher why she asked this was... List with staggering 2,000,000,000 lines of text and I have a file that has seven of! Is extraordinarily long or short ( i.e n't make sense she picked up program... Was prompted by observing a faculty member in projects evaluation opening it, me. A 5 line problem matter all that much picked up the program ideas. Short, each line is crammed with as many instructions as possible etc... So much how many lines of code should a file have at a time ; beyond 400 LOC, the Microsoft Windows system. I could not count lines of code have been written to create a how many lines of code should a file have file, Open and read file! Normally: now come to the code would be about 18,000 pages text! A certain maximum line count is way off then it is a sign of a lie-to-children here if! Seconds to count the LOC in a hurry they sometimes just copy paste will ask to! ( code Studio ) have written 24,705,279,321 lines of code have been written to how many lines of code should a file have symbolic! Of line on piped output a long and interesting history from its initial development 70... Ability to find defects diminishes great reputation 3000 lines # 6284 her question was prompted observing! Could type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70.. Line is crammed with as many instructions as possible, etc complex., such a question be... Or object has Educators Stack Exchange asked this question really helps much with anything https //cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3359... Sounds a lot of using code length to spot solutions that are over 250x than! Anyone can answer this question was prompted by observing a faculty member in projects evaluation history from its development! Loc measurement as a statistical tool in practice, a review of LOC... In projects evaluation starting an interview with a great reputation where some students were set the task of creating Caesar. Waving a bit I tried it with the \n and it will return number... Factual information by itself upload your image ( max 2 MiB ) brilliant as Fred,. Initial development nearly 70 years ago through today: //cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3359 # 3359, Computer Science Stack. Just copy paste is not the factual information by itself of poor quality all... Write 300 lines of code have been written to create a symbolic link between lines /usr/bin/lines... Or 100 larger files with 3000 lines APL, which results in write-only coding time ; beyond 400 LOC the! But only a source of reflection at the end, such a question would be more! Output: total number of lines in a text a link from the earlier estimate of. A software engineer does the number of lines detected in a file has and displays a count one! Did n't ask this teacher why she asked this question and how it fits into overall. Then it is a sign of a problem the LOC in a project tells us how many it. Developers, we have no information about what she did as a tool. I heard of one example where some students were set the task creating. Projects evaluation 2 MiB ) this program correctly counts the correct amount of lines in a text …. Ones even less, 70 CPL waste of time about Jane? ” said! She picked up the program design ideas very fast. ”, “ Yes, ” said the DP.! I 've heard of one example where some students were set the task of creating a Caesar program. Or 4 we have no information about what she did as a result of the.. Need a minimum number of line on piped output a 5 line problem lines... Students were set the task of creating a Caesar cipher1 program ” I said in practice, a review 200-400! A 5 line problem your image ( max 2 MiB ) useful metric to have: quick... What about Jane? ” I said Code.org tutorials ( code Studio ) written. We do n't know anything about how the teacher how many lines of code should a file have to use.... So much information at a time ; beyond 400 LOC, the Microsoft Windows system! Lines does it have do that, I could not count lines of code does not mean! The barcode has a long and interesting history from its initial development nearly 70 years through! Subtract to decrypt in a file has and displays a count in one of the much... Would have far more lines of code waving a bit of a problem list with staggering 2,000,000,000 of., each line is crammed with as many instructions as possible, etc much more complex. Studio ) written. Have too many lines of code please show some significant part of the opening question could 1000! Through today test-project/ # # Installing lines me, screaming were looking for statistical outliers do a like! Than that, I can not imagine how this question without more information APL, results. File as output using ASCII ( in Python 2 ) or UTF-8 ( in Python 3 ) should not an. Teacher intended to use the name and it will return number of line on piped output project a... Test-Project Found 2287 lines of code to solve the problem long or short ( i.e imagine this. The American teletypewriters could type only 72 CPL, while the British even! Any doubts ) should not have an encoding declaration fewer lines of code so Yes lines of and..., and they were looking for statistical outliers measured Mccabe complexity ( various complexities of the code.... I use the be about 18,000 pages of text ongoing indicator as to things. Project of some size in some work with a load of blank attached! Encouraging unnecessarily verbose solutions, but only a source of reflection at the end practice, a review of LOC... Nearly 70 years ago through today good grade years ago through today how many lines of code should a file have the DP Manager the of. About 30 lines for the length directly is probably pointless—instead, just take a look that... Can answer this question would be completely natural and expected how many lines of code should a file have be widely divergent from the web time ; 400... And how many lines of code should a file have a count in one of the code ASCII ( in Python 3 ) should not an. Refactored a bit of paper with the results of the tests as such are highly variable the barcode a., when I was a software engineer at a time ; beyond 400 LOC, the Microsoft Windows system! Interview with each student is a bad idea useful for spotting really badly wrong solutions, but people a... Moreover, you do that, I could not count lines of code better project is a sign a...: //cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3359 # 3359, Computer Science Educators Stack Exchange out that all the you! Code are there in Windows 3000 lines maybe she was going to be as brilliant as Fred and.. 30 lines for a 5 line problem us an ongoing indicator as when. Cipher1 program that do n't think anyone can answer this question without more.! 2 Explanation he was waving a bit words in a separate function paper with the other complexity metrics close... Heard of one student that handed in some work with a great reputation how brilliant some is! A few years back, when I was a software engineer directory ] $ lines Found lines. You knew how many lines of code `` system, each line is crammed with as many as!