Quote Originally Posted by sammy8
Does knowing the level of software I review change your mind as to the usefulness of a quick scoring technique?
Yes it does, quite considerably (I did almost exclusively mil spec software from 1977-1992).

Still it is a non-trivial task, and I would not be confident that it can be achieved (translation, if someone offered me a very lucrative contract to write such a peice of software, I would not take the contract).

Regarding comments, it really depends on what they are (and this is very difficult to parse. The following are completely useless (and likely to end up wrong at some point..
Code:
int i; // declare integer variable
i = 3; // initialize i to 3
i += j; // increment j by the current value of j.
If you look at the documentation methodology used by toold such as Doxygen, nDoc, jDoc, and SandCastle. These are very useful (XML formatted comments at the start of each element, that can be parsed and processed. Still I find (at least in commercial/industrial software) many cases where the information is not kept up to date.

The manual review proceses are really your best bet. Utilizing a good static analysis tool that can be "tuned" to your exact requirements will take some of the work out of the process, but the final reviews will still be done my a human.