What exactly is the token count in functions/methods used for?

Question

I've been using some tools to measure code quality and CCN (Cyclomatic Complexity Number) and some of those tools provides a count for tokens in functions what does that count says about my function or method? What is it used for?

Answer 1

Cyclomatic Complexity Number is a metric to indicate complexity of function, procedure or program. The best (large enough and intuitive) explanation I have found is provided here.

I think that tokens refer to conditional statements tokens that actually are taken into account to compute the cyclomatic complexity.

[later edit]

A high CCN means complex code that:

• it is (much) more hard to read and understand
• it is hard to maintain
• unit tests are harder to maintain since a decent code coverage is reached with more difficulty
• might lead to more bugs

CCN can be reduced using various techniques. Some examples can be seen here or here.