Couting the number of lines of code of a python program

[chaouche yacine]

Hello.

I'v written a small script that prints the number of lines
of code of a python program to stdout (by module, function, class and
method), the sources are available online here  https://www.assembla.com/code/tahar/subversion/nodes. The readme has an example usage as well as a trace of what the script prints.

The
problem is that I'm using the inspect module, because it provides a
nice function inspect.getsourcelines that takes a python object and
return its number of lines of code. BUT, it works on live objects, that
means one has to first import the module he wants to process, and this
can have side effects (example : GUI programs).

So my question is
how can one count the number of lines of code of a python program
without importing it (static code analysis) ?

Some people on IRC
advised me to look for the AST module. Can you give me a little help on
how to use this module to count the number oflines of code of a
function/method ?

Thanks in advance for your help.