Re: count-words-region and count-words-buffer

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Robert, please note that the functions in the elisp intro are written
for teaching purposes -- to demonstrate concepts such as recursions
and regexp search and how to debug them.  They were meant to be used
by end-users.

That word-counting is easy to implement is true to an extent, but it's
not sufficient argument for omitting such a basic functionality from
Emacs.  Also, while it may be easy to implement word-counting in some
form, it's harder to get it right, and harder yet to get it fast for
large buffers.  For example, the elisp intro code you cited uses a
regexp search to count words, which is slower than forward-word.  The
recursive version would also blow the specpdl-depth limit on large
buffers.