Back in my C days, we had a manager who was obsessed with line counts. Not just the data, but he wanted to make sure those lazy programmers weren't inflating their line count by including whitespace, comments, wrapped lines, or anything like that. He eventually came up with a byzantine set of rules he expected us to follow.

In the end, we started running code through the preprocessor before we delivered.

Moral: If you impose arbitrary metrics, programmers will do arbitrary things to reach those metrics.