cloc counts "#if 0" lines as code about cloc

[AlDanial]

It's an interesting idea but I don't see how I'd implement it in cloc. The behavior you're currently seeing is mentioned as item 6 of the Limitations section of the docs. cloc is regex-based and there's no regex I know of that can associate an #ifdef with its paired #endif.

If you can think of a way I'll consider it, otherwise will have to decline.

[xparq]

Footnote:

What actually counts as code can be use-case dependent: I may want to include all available code, or maybe I only want to see live/active code. The tool alone can't reliably guess, so this should be optional.

Related is whether to even count comments as "code": e.g. commented-out code can still be considered code (depending on the use case), only disabled temporarily (just like with #if 0).

Footnote to the footnote:

In fact, I'm usually interested in the lines of comments in general + code together, as "source material", in the spirit of Knuth's literate programming. (Note that (good) comments recording intent are even more important than the code itself, as code can be reproduced from those, but reverse-engineering intent from code is inherently lossy (as the code of evolving (i.e. not dead...) software is often sloppy/incomplete/buggy.)

Another reason I almost never count comments separately is that the overall extent of the "source material", e.g. as the amount of human work done is almost always a more interesting source metric to me than the number of code lines the machine would see, as its own amount of work. That's more like the realm of benchmarking instead.

(It's a blurred line, though, so (again) the user should be able decide. Hence, I always add --fmt=2. I wish that was the default from the get-go, though. I understand it's not possible to change now, breaking all the scripts out there. In fact, I'd probably prefer a --raw option for code + comment + blank (equivalent to wc -l) for a clear canonical baseline metric.)