Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!oddjob!ncar!ames!pacbell!att!ihnp4!twitch!hoqax!twb
From: twb@hoqax.UUCP (T.W. Beattie)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: C code metrics
Summary: NPATH
Keywords: metrics quality
Message-ID: <1627@hoqax.UUCP>
Date: 30 Jun 88 13:46:24 GMT
References: <4820@cg-atla.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 17

In article <4820@cg-atla.UUCP>, bradlee@cg-atla.UUCP (Rob Bradlee X5153) writes:
> Request for Help:
> I'm looking both for information explaining how to judge the size and
> quality of C code, and also for any tools that will automatically
> perform some analysis.

Earlier this year CACM had an excellent article about an NPATH complexity
metric.
It suggests that the complexity of the code (levels of nesting, etc) are
a useful measure of the quality of the code and a particularly good measure of
the maintainability of the code.

I particularly like this metric because it seems difficult to make the
code worse by decreasing the metric.
Many other metrics encourage bad coding practices.

Tombo.