How many lines?

[oex]

OK so I want to count how many lines in my application but I dont want to 'cheat' :lol... What is accepted convention? Do I count source lines or poasm lines or....? I guess the difference wont be that much.

[BlackVortex]

Comments don't count and empty lines don't count.

Also ... poasm ?   :toothy

[oex]

er dumppe sorry

[BogdanOntanu]

All lines count unless you exaggerate with empty lines. However if you are honest it is not possible to exaggerate with 10 empty lines in between your PROC's :D. One, two or three empty lines in between PROC's or in between important code sections acting as a visual separator are OK IMHO.

Empty lines and comments give your program more structure, ease of reading and understanding and because of this they do play an important role.

Use common sense and it should be OK.

[donkey]

Yup, I agree with Bogdan. The only program I ever sold was sold with an agreement for updates and mods and they were billed by the line. Vertical tabs (empty lines) were included in the line count as were comment lines. Though like he said I am very conscious of the fact that it is easy to overdo it and piss off the client so I tried to keep the number down, eventually I managed to get somebody else to take over the updates (I lost interest in the software) and I am not sure about how they work out the costs now.

Edgar

[jj2007]

OK so I want to count how many lines in my application but I dont want to 'cheat' :lol...

Using macros is cheating:

Good:

Code Select Expand

.data
MyString db "Masm32 is great", 0
TheCrLf db 13, 10, 0

.code
push offset MyString
call StdOut
push offset TheCrLf
call StdOut


Bad:

Code Select Expand

print "Masm32 is great", 13, 10

:wink

[oex]

:bg it's as lean as I can reasonably get it (about 30-40k lines).... been putting the finishing touches to it for... a while... and it's still not finished yet, I used to write far bigger apps in php but you really cant compare the 2 languages :lol.... Anyways back to it, thanks for your input guys, this is for my own benefit rather than for a customer I've seen a lot of apps about and it's so hard to put a value on my code/time. To write an app as efficiently as possible and compare based on line count is about the best I think I can do, it's kinda a 'different' project, ie it has no market till I promote it so it helps to come up with 'sensible pricing'.

[Astro]

Hi,

I never know whether to count lines or time, so I take 3/4 of the time I took to write it, to allow for stuff like getting stuck, etc.. Works out pretty well. I then look at the software and what it does, and try and put a figure on that. Finally, I look at whether it is a one-off, or could sell thousands of units. I then find a price somewhere in the middle and call it The Price. If it is going to sell in units, I divide The Price by the minimum number of units I think it will sell and that becomes the unit price.

Best regards,
Robin.

[BlackVortex]

(about 30-40k lines).... I used to write far bigger apps in php

What do your programs do, cure cancer ?

[oex]

heh just took debugging out and it's down to 25k lines.... I like to code everything 'raw' (including my fingers :lol).... Even if M$ functionality is more efficient at least I know what's going on in my app. I want my finished application to be all my own work so I have written all that is efficient to write from the update to the compression to the installer. At least this way I know there are no licensing issues and I can fix the bugs. I have taken a few ideas from this and other forums but in the most part it's all my own work. I'm aiming for a 128Kb app including resources but still some Kbs too heavy (which is going to have to come out of the resources somehow :lol).... It still feels like kiddy script compared to Bogdan's SOL OS :lol.... Still the real nightmare is the 150Mb data the demo downloads off the server.... This is going to translate to maybe up to 5Gb for the full version so there is a lot of work to do on the compression backend.