I don't see how "logical lines", whatever that is At least by the definition I'm accustomed with, a logical line is a statement or series of statements which d

I don't see how "logical lines", whatever that is At least by the definition I'm accustomed with, a logical line is a statement or series of statements which directly and logically belong together, for example a function call or an arithmetic operation. Logical lines are independent from physical lines as each logical line can be split over multiple physical lines (eg splitting up a long string IO operation), or one physical line can contain multiple logical lines (this is a bad idea in most cases though). Since the definition hinges a bit on what somebody considers as "logically belonging together", the whole concept is a bit fuzzy. Consider this string formatting operation (Python): somestring.split(somechar)[-1]).replace("foo", "bar") Do you consider this one logical line? Or would your logical lines look more like this: somestring = somestring.split(somechar) somestring = somestring[-1] somestring = somestring.replace("foo", "bar") Both are valid interpretations of logical lines, but they are visually and conceptually quite different, which makes it - imho - a bit problematic to try and use them as a measure of code quality.