Ron Coleman and Pritesh Gandhi, Marist College, USA

This paper studies a new, quantitative approach using fractal geometry to analyse basic tenets of good programming style. Experiments on C source of the GNU/Linux Core Utilities, a collection of 114 programs or approximately 70,000 lines of code, show systematic changes in style are correlated with statistically significant changes in fractal dimension (P≤0.0009). The data further show positive but weak correlation between lines of code and fractal dimension (r=0.0878). These results suggest the fractal dimension is a reliable metric of changes that affect good style, the knowledge of which may be useful for maintaining a code base.

Good programming style, fractal dimension, GNU/Linux Core Utilities