Helping to find the usefulness of a proposal

[brucechapman at paradise.net.nz]

Good idea,

Should they each be evaluated against the same corpus and what would be a
suitable corpus?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics

Bruce

Quoting Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org>:

> All,
> One possible way I'd like to suggest that the coin evaluation could be
> helped would be to write a script to find out how frequently the
> specific issue comes up in real code.
> 
> It should be possible to devise, write and run a script to find the
> number of LOCs affected by many of the proposals. For example:
> 
> - strings in switch (find if else on constant strings)
> - multi-catch (find duplicate catch blocks)
> - elvis operator (find ternary and if else defaulting)
> - for each where the iterator remove can be accessed (% of loops that
> access iterator)
> - for each where index is needed (% of loops that use int looping)
> - method and field literals
> - byte and short literals
> and probably many others (I've just listed some proposals I remember)
> 
> Ideally, any script would be ASM/BCEL based, but grep style might work
> too.
> 
> I mention all this because I don't have the spare time to write such a
> script, but if you do, then I'm sure we'd all like to run it and
> discuss the results ;-)
> 
> Stephen
>