What does 'semicolon' mean as a unit of size

Question

On the Io home page it mentions its small size, but it uses a unit of measure I've not seen before:

small vm (~10K semicolons)

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

Answer 1

It's a measure of Logical lines of code.

Rather than simply counting all lines of code, including comments, blank lines, etc., you only measure the lines that end in a semicolon. It's a still-simple but more accurate measure of how large a piece of code is.