Counting lines with Common Lisp
A good line counting program has two features: it only counts non-empty lines to get a fair estimate of the size of a project, and it groups line counts by file type to help see immediately which languages are used.
A long time ago I got frustrated with two well known line counters. Sloccount spits out multiple strange Perl warnings about locales, and most of the output is a copyright notice and some absurd cost estimations. Cloc has fourteen Perl packages as dependencies. Writing a simple line counter is an interesting exercise; at the time I was discovering Common Lisp, so I wrote my own version.
I made a few changes years after years, but most of the code stayed the same. I thought it would be interesting to revisit this program and present it part by part as a demonstration of how you can use Common Lisp to solve a simple problem.
The program is written in Common Lisp. The most convenient way of storing and executing it is a single executable file stored in a directory being part of the PATH environment variable. In my case, the script will be called locc, for “line of code counter”, and will be stored in the ~/bin directory.
