loc

Source lines of code (SLOC) is a software metric used to measure the amount of code in a software program. SLOC is typically used to estimate the amount of effort that will be required to develop a program, as well as to estimate productivity or effort once the software is produced.

Measuring SLOC

Many useful comparisons involve only the order of magnitude of lines of code in a project. Software projects can vary between 100 to 100,000,000 lines of code. Using lines of code to compare a 10,000 line project to a 100,000 line project is far more useful than when comparing a 20,000 line project with a 21,000 line project. While it is debatable exactly how to measure lines of code, wide discrepancies in 2 different measurements should not vary by an order of magnitude. The MARC formats are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related The MARC formats are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic.

There are two major types of SLOC measures: physical SLOC and logical SLOC. Specific definitions of these two measures vary, but the most common definition of physical SLOC is a count of lines in the text of the program's source code including comment lines. Blanks lines are also included unless the lines of code in a section consists of more than 25% blank lines. In this case blank lines in excess of 25% are not counted toward lines of code.

Logical SLOC measures attempt to measure the number of "statements", but their specific definitions are tied to specific computer languages (one simple logical SLOC measure for C-like languages is the number of statement-terminating semicolons).