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Comment on Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxesparent

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Could I ask for one more data: the total number of characters and maybe lines? That way symbol/alpha/line ratios could be compared to other languages.

Yeah, when I get a chance I'll gather together some stats on all the languages I have data on (about 40).

Finder reports 630,942,867 bytes for the whole directory. Assuming most files will be plain ASCII, that should give a good approximation for the total number of characters.

Based on those numbers I gathered some stats about keyboard layouts:

* 18% of all characters are symbols, 12% are spaces and 70% are alphabetic

* 20% of all non-space characters are symbols and 80% are alphabetic.

* US kb layout users need to use shift for 64% of symbols

* Finnish/Swedish kb layout users need to use shift for 73% of symbols and AltGr for 7% of symbols.

* Fi/Swe layout users thus need to use 25% more modifer keys for symbols.

Conclusion: Fi/Swe layout sucks.

edit: https://gist.github.com/1205728 python script used to get these numbers (percentages calculated with OOo Calc).

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