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I would be curious to see what are the average metrics of written English on one side, and code on the other side.

• length of paragraphs
• length of lines
• size of words
• chars used
• ratio between alphabetic, numeric and other symbol characters
• number of symbols per word
• etc.

Maybe that alone could discriminate already between code and the rest. At least I believe code, regardless of language, would show some noticeably different metrics in many cases.

The good news is: you already have plenty of data to build your statistics upon.

Ok I'm back with some data to back my assumptions up. :-)

I did a quick and dirty test on your own post and on the first post I found on StackOverflow, with a pretty advanced tool: wc.

Here is what I had after running wc on the text part and on the code part of those two examples:

First lets look at the English part:

• The English part of your post (2635 chars, 468 words, 32 lines)
  • 5 chars/word, 82 chars/line, 14 words/line
• The English part of the other post (1499 chars, 237 words, 12 lines)
  • 6 chars/word, 124 chars/line, 19 words/line

Pretty similar don't you think?

Now lets take a look at the code part!

• The code part of your post (174 chars, 13 words, 3 lines)
  • 13 chars/word, 58 chars/line, 4 words/line
• The code part of the other post (4181 chars, 287 words, 151 lines)
  • 14 chars/word, 27 chars/line, 2 words/line

See how not so different those metrics are, but more importantly, how different they are from the English metrics? And this is just using a limited tool. I am now sure you can get something really accurate by measuring more metrics (I'm thinking in particular of chars statistics).

I can haz cookie?

I would be curious to see what are the average metrics of written English on one side, and code on the other side.

• length of paragraphs
• length of lines
• size of words
• chars used
• ratio between alphabetic, numeric and other symbol characters
• number of symbols per word
• etc.

Maybe that alone could discriminate already between code and the rest. At least I believe code, regardless of language, would show some noticeably different metrics in many cases.

The good news is: you already have plenty of data to build your statistics upon.

Ok I'm back with some data to back my assumptions up. :-)

I did a quick and dirty test on your own post and on the first post I found on StackOverflow, with a pretty advanced tool: wc.

Here is what I had after running wc on the text part and on the code part of those two examples:

First lets look at the English part:

• The English part of your post (2635 chars, 468 words, 32 lines)
  • 5 chars/word, 82 chars/line, 14 words/line
• The English part of the other post (1499 chars, 237 words, 12 lines)
  • 6 chars/word, 124 chars/line, 19 words/line

Pretty similar don't you think?

Now lets take a look at the code part!

• The code part of your post (174 chars, 13 words, 3 lines)
  • 13 chars/word, 58 chars/line, 4 words/line
• The code part of the other post (4181 chars, 287 words, 151 lines)
  • 14 chars/word, 27 chars/line, 2 words/line

See how not so different those metrics are, but more importantly, how different they are from the English metrics? And this is just using a limited tool. I am now sure you can get something really accurate by measuring more metrics (I'm thinking in particular of chars statistics).

I can haz cookie?

I would be curious to see what are the average metrics of written English on one side, and code on the other side.

• length of paragraphs
• length of lines
• size of words
• chars used
• ratio between alphabetic, numeric and other symbol characters
• number of symbols per word
• etc.

Maybe that alone could discriminate already between code and the rest. At least I believe code, regardless of language, would show some noticeably different metrics in many cases.

The good news is: you already have plenty of data to build your statistics upon.

I would be curious to see what are the average metrics of written English on one side, and code on the other side.

• length of paragraphs
• length of lines
• size of words
• chars used
• ratio between alphabetic, numeric and other symbol characters
• number of symbols per word
• etc.

Maybe that alone could discriminate already between code and the rest. At least I believe code, regardless of language, would show some noticeably different metrics in many cases.

The good news is: you already have plenty of data to build your statistics upon.

Ok I'm back with some data to back my assumptions up. :-)

I did a quick and dirty test on your own post and on the first post I found on StackOverflow, with a pretty advanced tool: wc.

Here is what I had after running wc on the text part and on the code part of those two examples:

First lets look at the English part:

• The English part of your post (2635 chars, 468 words, 32 lines)
  • 5 chars/word, 82 chars/line, 14 words/line
• The English part of the other post (1499 chars, 237 words, 12 lines)
  • 6 chars/word, 124 chars/line, 19 words/line

Pretty similar don't you think?

Now lets take a look at the code part!

• The code part of your post (174 chars, 13 words, 3 lines)
  • 13 chars/word, 58 chars/line, 4 words/line
• The code part of the other post (4181 chars, 287 words, 151 lines)
  • 14 chars/word, 27 chars/line, 2 words/line

See how not so different those metrics are, but more importantly, how different they are from the English metrics? And this is just using a limited tool. I am now sure you can get something really accurate by measuring more metrics (I'm thinking in particular of chars statistics).

I can haz cookie?

I would be curious to see what are the average metrics of written English on one side, and code on the other side.

• size of words
• chars used
• ratio between alphabetic, numeric and mark characters
• etc.

Maybe that alone could discriminate already between code and the rest.

The good news is: you already have plenty of data to build your statistics upon.

I would be curious to see what are the average metrics of written English on one side, and code on the other side.

• length of paragraphs
• length of lines
• size of words
• chars used
• ratio between alphabetic, numeric and other symbol characters
• number of symbols per word
• etc.

Maybe that alone could discriminate already between code and the rest. At least I believe code, regardless of language, would show some noticeably different metrics in many cases.

The good news is: you already have plenty of data to build your statistics upon.