What does "semicolon" mean as a unit of size

Question

On the Io homepage , it mentions its small size, but it uses a unit of measurement that I have not seen before:

small vm (~ 10K with a comma)

Is it just the size in characters (~ bytes), or is there something more subtle here?

Answer 1

This is a measure of logical lines of code .

Instead of simply counting all lines of code, including comments, empty lines, etc., you only measure lines ending with a semicolon. This is another simple but more accurate indicator of how large a piece of code is.