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.