The Short Progam

Here is the short program, written in C, that was used to perform the frequncy count. 
#include "stdio.h"
#include "ctype.h"

main()
{
  char    c;
  int     j;
  double  count[26];

  for (j = 0 ; j < 26 ; j++)
     count[j] = 0.0;
  while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)
     {
     if (isalpha(c) != 0)
        {
        count[tolower(c)-'a'] = count[tolower(c)-'a'] + 1.0;
        }
     }
  printf("\n");
  for (j = 0 ; j < 26 ; j++)
     printf("%c %6.lf\t", j+'a', count[j]);
  printf("\n");
}

You can compile this program yourself, calling it FREQ.EXE, or download ours. To perform a frequency count on a text file named MESSAGE.TXT, you would type

FREQ <MESSAGE.TXT.

On a machine with a moderate speed hard-drive, the 800 page document took about a minute to count. You can also download this document as a 750 K zip file, if you want.

< Previous MAW 1997