I think both lines of code and number of files are terrible metrics to use to compare sizes of code base across three very different languages. I don't have any experience with Fortran, but as a seasoned R and C hacker, I don't think the two languages could be much more different.<p>Well written R code tends to be incredibly compact, because the functions available in base R are plentiful and the language is both heavily functional and vector-oriented. The amount of manual memory management and explicit looping required by C easily inflates the lines of code.<p>A better metric, perhaps, would be to count the number of functions written in each language. Of course, there are issues of style there, but I think that would lead to a more comparable estimate. I don't know of a tool that does that for C - anyone know of one - or should I go the parser route?