2.8. Word Count Example Program (Again)

We can use much of what we’ve covered in this chapter to help make some sense of the word count example program from the introduction. Here it is again:

countchar = 'w'

file = open("atotc_opening.txt")

text = file.read()

words = text.split()

count = 0
for word in words:
    if word.startswith(countchar):
        count = count + 1

file.close()

print(f"{count} words start with '{countchar}'.")

Here is what we can understand so far, just based on the contents of this chapter:

countchar = 'w'

Right away, we can see that this line is an example of the assignment statement syntax pattern. We can interpret this as “The countchar variable gets the value 'w',” and we know that 'w' is a string value.

file = open("atotc_opening.txt")

Again, we have an assignment statement. It’s creating a variable called file and assigning it… What? Well, we don’t know exactly what that does yet, but from the context we can guess that it has something to do with the file named atotc_opening.txt. We’ll cover the open() function later.

text = file.read()
words = text.split()

More assignment statements, this time creating a text variable and a words variable. The file variable from the line above is used here, but again, the details of what, precisely, these lines do will come later in the book. The variable names help us understand the code, though, because they were chosen well. It’s possible to guess that this will “read” the file that was “opened” earlier, that the text variable will contain the text of that file, and that words will contain words from that text.

count = 0

Another simple assignment statement. Here, count gets the value 0. Many programs start with a series of variable assignments like these, creating variables and giving them initial values for the rest of the program to use.

for word in words:
    if word.startswith(countchar):

The for and if keywords used in these lines will be covered in the very next chapter. For now, form a guess about what they mean based on what you know of the variables involved, the common English meaning of the words used, and what you can see the program output. You can compare your guess to the formal definitions when you reach them in a few sections.

count = count + 1

Here we have an assignment statement with an expression on the right hand side. This is an example of a variable update, and specifically it is an increment. This line sets the count variable to get its current value plus one.

file.close()

print(f"{count} words start with '{countchar}'.")

In these remaining lines, we see a print statement, but with an oddly-formed string, and something to do with the file variable above. The meaning of these can be guessed from the names used and the context, but we have no precise interpretation for them yet.