Zipf's Law Demo done several ways

Copyright (c) 2010 Bart Massey

This code comprises a Zipf's Law calculator in various languages, largely as an example for a software engineering course I taught in 2010.

The included sample text file swift.txt is "Tom Swift And His Electric Runabout" from Project Gutenberg, although the attribution has been stripped out for the sake of the analysis. There is also a file eztest.txt for checking that the software is working correctly, and a random word generator randtest.py for generating comparison files.

Build and Run

The included Makefile can build any and all of the following programs. The programs read text from standard input and output a histogram of word frequencies sorted by word frequency rank order. Gnuplot can be used to display the output histogram.

• zipf.sh: A standalone shell script version.

• zipf-cc: A C++ version.

• zipf-hs: A Haskell version. This version requires an installation of GHC (Debian package ghc) to build.

• zipf-cc-graphical: A C++ version with graphical display. Takes the source text as an argument. This version requires pkgconfig, libplot, and the libplot Cairo driver (Debian packages pkgconfig, libplot-dev and libplot-cairo) to build.

License

This work is released under the "MIT License". Please see the file COPYING in this distribution for license terms.