This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: line noise in languages Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

• We don't look at code in file-out notation, so the eextraneous bangs would pump up the noise
• We don't look at the code in VW's XML format either, which would also be noisy.
• The noise program classifies any non-alphanumeric, non-whitespace character as noise. First, that's a very rough measure. Second, in Smalltalk, a lot of those are methods, so classifying them as noise is unfair.

In looking at the example, I grabbed 25 or so lines of Smalltalk from a few methods, and created a small noise filter - #($# $^ $! $( $) $[ $] $: $; $.) are 'noise' in the sense of the comparison here. Running over a small bit of Smalltalk code, I came up with 35. Now, the question is, is the colon really noise in Smalltalk - since it conveys semantic information? I don't know. to some extent, the measure is poorly done for all these languages, but there's the value I came up with.