The VAX was a family of machines built by Digital in the nineteen seventies
and eighties. A VAX ran VMS, and VMS was a careful system with a long memory.
Programs on a VAX could be written in many languages, and the languages could
call each other, because the system defined one calling standard for all of
them.

Icon is a language for working with strings and structures. It does not ask
the programmer to write loops to search for things; an expression can produce
a sequence of results, and the system goes back to try the next one when the
first one fails. The idea is called goal directed evaluation, and the result
is that a short program does the work of a long one.

A sorted list of words is a good test of a language. The program reads the
text, picks out the words, counts them in a table, and prints the ones that
occur most often. The words in this file were chosen so that the VAX and the
language and the system appear many times, and so that a few words appear
exactly the same number of times, to test the order of ties.

It is a short program in Icon. It would be a longer program in a language
without tables, and a much longer one in a language without strings.
