[trealira]

It's funny that you call that the standard algorithm, because, although it intuitively makes sense, this is the first time I've seen that word-counting algorithm.

The first implementation of wc I ever saw was the one from The C Programming Language, which has this written at the beginning of the book (except instead of "(isspace(c))" they wrote "(c == ' ' || c == '\n' || c == '\t')"):

  state = OUT;
  nl = nw = nc = 0;
  while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
      ++nc;
      if (c == '\n')
          ++nl;
      if (isspace(c))
          state = OUT;
      else if (state == OUT) {
          state = IN;
          ++nw;
      }
  }