Not that the point really needs reenforcing any, but the story might amuse.

A few (more..) years ago whilst contracting at a large azure company, a bean counter somewhere started recording "kloc metrics". Through an accident of mixed up mailing lists, one of 'us' became aware what some of 'them' were doing, and for some strange reason, a relatively small group of 'us' starting harmonising our comment block style on the rather obscure 

/*;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
   This bit should be reasonably self explanitory
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;*/

[download]

which was nice, but soon became passé...and had to become 

//;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
//  this bits quite important
//;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

[download]

but again this went out of vogue as the fashion police became cleverer at detecting fakes so 

{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};
// Not sure about this bit
{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};{;};

[download]

This cycle-of-fashion ran on for a while until the edict came down from on high

Thou shalt not use extranious semi-colons in C code

The challenge then for the top couturiers was to see who could write the longest single, valid, line of c code.

Of course, the comma operator came into its own for this.

Interestingly, my very first sight of a Perl program (deftly moving the subject back on-topic:), was a 300+ line Perl/CGI script of which about 200 lines was a single, poetry-mode, print statement producing a (near) static table in html.

I knew then that I was going to like Perl...albeit that it was one ugly piece of code.

In reply to Re: Counting lines of C code by BrowserUk
in thread Counting lines of C code by Sara

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.