Re: little ObjectiveC poll.

[Marcel Weiher]

On 2 Feb 2006, at 05:28, Lloyd Dupont wrote:

> I haven't really programmed in ObjectiveC since a long time now.
> But I have to work with my boss's source, developed on MacOSX all  
> in ObjectiveC.
>
> Something puzzles me and I wonder if it's normal in  
> "ObjectiveC" (or C)..... (or if I'mjust unlucky ;-)
> His files are very long (most of them over a few 10 of thousands   
> lines) and some methods are very long too (up to 1 to 2 or 3  
> thousands line. 1 thousands line is common, 3 is rare).

Statistics from my Kits:

marcel@tpol[Kits]loc-count
   72826  351109 3024156
marcel@tpol[Kits]find . -type f | egrep '(.java|\.c$|\.m$|\.h$)' |  wc
    1172    1172   44987

So that's 72826 non-empty, non-comment source code lines spread over  
slightly over 1000 source files, for around 70 lines per source  
file.  Of course, that's skewed a bit because header files tend to be  
small, so let's look at just the .m files:

marcel@tpol[Kits]find . -type f | egrep '.*\.([m])$'  | wc
     534     534   20045
marcel@tpol[Kits]find . -type f | egrep '.*\.([m])$' | xargs cat |   
egrep -v '^[[:space:]]*$' | grep -v '^[[:space:]]*{[[:space:]]*$' |  
grep -v '^[^[:alnum:]]*}$' | grep -v '^[[:space:]]*//' | grep -v '^ 
[[:space:]]["![:space:]]*"[[:space:]]*$'  | wc
   43175  136649 1613933
marcel@tpol[Kits]stsh
> 43175.0 / 534
80.85206

So looking just at the .m files gives us 43 KLOC in 534 files, for an  
average of 80.852 non-comment, non-space lines per file.

> Now I wonder, is it "common practice" in ObjectiveC, or is it just  
> my boss?

Well, I don't think it has anything to do with Objective-C.  In fact,  
in Objective-C, short methods ( 3-7 lines ) with intention-revealing  
selectors are encouraged.  However, it appears to be common practice  
in the industry :-(

> For example right now I'm looking at porting mouse selection /  
> dragging to windows.
> The last 2 methods I looked at
> - moveSelectedGraphicWithEvent:
> - reparentSelectedGraphicsWithEvent:forced:offset:
>
> are 1300 and 1500 lines long....
>
> what do you think?

OUCH!

Marcel