Re: FWTK and smap/smapd

[Joseph S D Yao <jsdy () center osis gov>]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 09:05:07AM -0400, Frederick M Avolio wrote:
...
> Even Eric Allman (father of Sendmail), cannot understand a program with 10s 
> of thousands of lines of C code. It is way too complex. But we could look 
> at 10 lines and come up with a high level of assurance that a server like 
> this is bug free and safe. We can do it less easily with 100 lines, or even 
> 1000 lines.* Though our level of assurance might be less, it is still 
> possible. We -- no one, is what I mean -- could never do that with 80,000 
> lines of code.

Lines-of-code is a very rough measure.  The version of FWTK's 'smap'
with one consolidated set of patches is this large, nominally:

wc smap/smap.c
2850 12722 81518 smap/smap.c

However, my major contribution to the consolidated patch - besides
removing a lot of bugs - was to put in a lot of comments.  "It is
obvious" that very little code is self-explanatory.  ;-)

wc smap/smap_stripped.c
1493 3499 29700 smap/smap_stripped.c

I guess about half the "lines of code" are comments, or have comments
in-line.  Or, to be picky, are blank lines around comments.  More
importantly, removing the comments removed almost three quarters of
what 'wc' recognized as "words", and almost two thirds of the bytes.

Whether comments add to or distract from readability is a totally
different question [and really depends on the comments IMHO].

-- 
Joe Yao                         jsdy () center osis gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
OSIS Center Systems Support                                     EMT-B
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