But that means you have to do this:

if
{
  ...
}
else
{
  ...
}

It was those if/else statements that convinced me to switch to brackets
on the same line.

I like Robert Martin's quote on metrics, "However,
a metric is not a god; it is merely a measurement against an arbitrary
standard. It is certainly
possible that the standard chosen ... is appropriate only for certain
applications and is not
appropriate for others. It may also be that there are far better metrics
that can be used to measure
the quality of a design."

Metrics certainly have severely limited value.

Calling them, "Useless," however, seems a little harsh. Matthias, I'm
genuinely interested in hearing your experiences with them; it sounds like
you have an interesting story to tell.

Metrics are just the degree to which machines (as opposed to humans)
understand how good code is.

No, scratch that: metrics are just the degree to which a human can tell a
machine how good a piece of code is.

And that's very, very limited.

But it's not nothing.

We can tell machines that there are some things that are easily recognisable
as bad design, no matter what the scenario.

For example, circular dependencies.

Machines are great at finding circular dependencies, humans aren't (that's
why we create them).

And just because a design has circular dependencies doesn't mean that it is
rubbish (most popular projects on sourceforge have circular dependencies);
but I've not yet come across a programmer who said that a good design
should have circular dependencies.

OT: I've just started using KNode as my newsreader. It highlights
misspellings as I type them. I know that's nothing new, but after coming
from my old newsreader, it feels like wonderful magic. (Cue someone
pointing out misspellings in this post.)

PS I like the way you capitalised, "Astrology;" it sort of lends that art a
degree of respect against which that the rest of your mail railed, and gave
your post a nice, literary tension.

PPS I wonder whether OTs should come before PSs in the grand scheme of
letter-writing (of which newsgroup posts are the latest incarnation).

PPPS Can we also use OOT and OOOT in our posts?

PPPPS Or would OTT be more appropriate than OOT?

PPPPPS Oh, dear, Matthias, you may have just spawned an industry:
computational astrology: the predictions of the success of a piece of
software based on when it was written. I see my Fractality tool (began
24/02/2004, around 8pmish) is a Pisces, which means it's, "Imaginative and
sensitive, Compassionate and kind, Selfless and unworldly, Intuitive and
sympathetic." Good, then it's not, "Riddled with heinous bugs and doomed to
misinterpret Java 6 bytecode for which it's still not updated to parse."

He had probably been an assembly-langauge programmer; it was very common for
assemblers, especially those which read punched cards, to have fixed fields
for (say) label, operator, operands, and comments, e.g.

 start:   mov  r0        -(sp)   push start address
          mov  r1        -(sp)   push size
          mov  r2        -(sp)   push destination address
          jsr  copy              copy block

So do I, for one good reason: most OSen[1] don't allow you to specify
the length of a tab. Most source editors (vi, microEmacs, PFE, ....) do,
but changing the tab spacing causes them to use spaces instead.

The near universal standard tab space of 8 characters is way too long -
3 or 4 characters is about right.

[1] Microware's OS-9 is the honorable exception: tab spacing is
configurable at the terminal driver level and can be retrieved by any
program that needs to know what it is. The OS-9 default tab spacing is 4
characters - a sensible value.