I had a idea today.

I wanted to know what are the top most frequently used functions in the
emacs lisp language. I thought i can write a quick script that go thru
all the elisp library locations and get a word-frequency report i want.

I started with a simple program:
http://xahlee.org/p/titus/count_word_frequency.py

and applied it to a Shakespeare text. Here's a sample result:
http://xahlee.org/p/titus/word_frequency.html

Then, i wrote a more elaborate one that recurse thru directories to
work on elisp code treasury.

The code is here:
http://xahlee.org/x/count_word_frequency.py

and i got a strange result. The word “the” appeared on the top,
along with many other English words. I quickly realized that these are
due to lisp function's doc strings. (not comments)

At this point, it dawned on me that there's no easy way to work around
this, Unless, i write this script in elisp which has functions that
read lisp code and can easily filter out doc strings.

Originally, i planned to use the word-frequency script on Perl, Python,
as well as Java, as well as Elisp. However, now it seems to me this
task is nigh impossible. Each of these lang has their own doc string
syntax. It's gonna be a heavy undertaking if the word-frequency script
is to work with all these langs, since that amounts to writing a parser
for each lang.

Alternatively, one can write multiple word-frequency scripts using each
lang in question, since most lang has facilities to deal with its own
syntax. However, this is still not trivial, and amounts to several
programing efforts.

Anyone would be interested in this problem?

PS bpalmer on #emacs irc.freenode wrote a elisp quicky to deal with
lisp, but that program is currently not fully working... see bottom
http://paste.lisp.org/display/28840

 Xah
 xah@xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/