Acronym for "thousand Lines Of Code". Pronounced "Kay-loak". This (by some people and some
corporations) is a way to measure the worth and/or complexity of a piece of software.
Large corporations that do custom software development (IBM, Andersen Consulting, or the U.S. government) love to refer to their product size by KLOC. Just envision a conference room at IBM with 10 or so project managers:
Bob: "There is no way we can spare any resources to help your group. My team is running a 100 KLOC project right now that is due in 3 months."
Bill: "Oh come on, you know I have a 800 KLOC assignment. I need some extra resources if we have any chance of completing this project."
Jim the director: "Well, Bob, you have also been assigned the 'Brumberg' project. Have you come up with any estimates for that one yet?"
Bob: "Yes. We have a spec outlining all the subsystems. We estimate that it will be a 450 KLOC project."
This kind of mentality just drives me crazy. The complexity and degree of difficulty of a software project has very little to do with how many lines of code it contains. I have personally seen some extremely complex code that probably took weeks to write is a mere 30 lines in length. On the other hand, I have seen code that is thousands of lines long that does nothing of worth.
Remember, bigger != better.