wc/README.md

# ww: count words in 50 lines of C

## Desiderata

- Simplicity: Just count words, as delimited by: spaces, tabs, newlines. 
- No flags.
- Avoid off-by-one errors.
- Allow piping, as well as reading files.
- Small.
- Linux only.

## Comparison with wc.

The GNU utils version ([github](https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/tree/master/src/wc.c), [savannah](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=src/wc.c;hb=HEAD)) is a bit over 1K lines of C. It does many things and checks many possible failure modes. I think it detects whether it should be reading from stdin using some very wrapped fstat. 

The busybox version ([git.busybox.net](https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/coreutils/wc.c)) of wc is much shorter, at 257 lines, while striving to be [POSIX-compliant](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/), meaning it has flags.

The plan9port version of wc ([github](https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/src/cmd/wc.c)) implements some sort of table method, in 352 lines. So does the [plan9](https://9p.io/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/wc.c) version, which is worse documented, but shorter.

[Here](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7-Snapshot-Development/usr/src/cmd/wc.c) is a version of wc from UNIX V7, at 86 lines, and allowing for both word and line counts. I couldn't find a version in UNIX V6. Of all the versions, I think I understand this one best.

## Steps:

- [x] Look into how C utilities both read from stdin and from files.
- [x] Program first version of the utility
- [x] Compare with other implementations, see how they do it, after I've read my own version
  - [x] Compare with gnu utils.
    
  - [x] Compare with musl/busybox implementations, 
  - ~~Maybe make some pull requests, if I'm doing something better? => doesn't seem like it~~
- [ ] Install to ww, but check that ww is empty (installing to wc2 or smth would mean that you don't save that many keypresses vs wc -w)
- ~~[ ] Could use zig? => Not for now~~
- [ ] Look specifically at how other versions do stuff.
  - [ ] Distinguish between reading from stdin and reading from a file
    - If it doesn't have arguments, read from stdin. 
  - [ ] Open files, read characters.
- [ ] Write version that counts lines
- [ ] Document reading from user-inputed stdin (end with Ctrl+D)
- [ ] Write man files?
- [ ] Write a version for other coreutils? <https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/coreutils/>? Would be a really nice project. 
  - Simple utils.
- zig?
- https://github.com/leecannon/zig-coreutils
- https://github.com/keiranrowan/tiny-core/tree/master
- [x] Add lc
  - Take into account what happens if file doesn't end in newline.
- [ ] add chc (cc is "c compiler")