Counting lines of code and comments is sometimes bogus, since most of what we write may be written in one or more lines, depending column count limitations, screen size, style and so forth.

Since the commonly used languages (say C, C++, C# and Java) are free-form, wouldn't it be more clever to count characters instead?

Edit: I'm not considering LOC-oriented programming where coders try to artificially match requirements by adding irrelevant comments or using multiple lines where less would be enough (or the opposite). I'm interested in better metrics that would be independent of coding style, to be used by honest programmers.