Question

My professor commonly asks my class how many statements there are in a given program, but I can’t determine what he defines as a statement. It seems as though an if/else is one statement, and a for loop is one statement regardless of if there are other supposed statements within it. Are there any governing rules for this matter or is his definition of his own invention?

Thanks

Answer 1

For a precise definition of a statement:

Definition: A statement is a block of code that does something. An assignment statement assigns a value to a variable. A for statement performs a loop.
In C, C++ and C# Statements can be grouped together as one statement using curly brackets

{
statement1;
statement2;
}

As far as counting statements, I agree with the others, there’s not much point. Counting Lines of Code (LOC) though, actually has some value and there’s a lot of research that tries to relate the number of LOC to the workload of developers. It’s possible that your instructor is having you count statements and thinking of statements as nothing more than a single LOC, which isn’t quite the case.