On the effect of different counting rules for control flow operators on Software Science metrics in Fortran
S. D. Conte, Vincent Y. Shen, K. Dickey · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 1982
Halstead in his Theory of Software Science, proposed that in the Fortran language, each occurrence of a GOTO i for different label i 's be counted as a unique operator. Several writers have questioned the wisdom of this method of counting GOTO's. In this paper, we investigate the effect of counting GOTO's as several occurrences of a single unique operator on various software science metrics. Some 412 modules from the International Mathematical and Statistical Libraries (IMSL) are used as the data base for this study.