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14 Counting Words in a defun

Our next project is to count the number of words in a function definition. Clearly, this can be done using some variant of count-word-region. See Counting Words: Repetition and Regexps. If we are just going to count the words in one definition, it is easy enough to mark the definition with the C-M-h (mark-defun) command, and then call count-word-region.

However, I am more ambitious: I want to count the words and symbols in every definition in the Emacs sources and then print a graph that shows how many functions there are of each length: how many contain 40 to 49 words or symbols, how many contain 50 to 59 words or symbols, and so on. I have often been curious how long a typical function is, and this will tell.

• Divide and Conquer:
• Words and Symbols: What to count?
• Syntax: What constitutes a word or symbol?
• count-words-in-defun: Very like count-words.
• Several defuns: Counting several defuns in a file.
• Find a File: Do you want to look at a file?
• lengths-list-file: A list of the lengths of many definitions.
• Several files: Counting in definitions in different files.
• Several files recursively: Recursively counting in different files.
• Prepare the data: Prepare the data for display in a graph.