The webcounter design was very ad-hoc—the requirements were that it display a graphical image to illustrate on-demand data generation in a resource manager. Most of the command-line options were defined right at the time that I edited main.c—things like the X and Y image size, the background and foreground colors, and so on. The -n parameter, to determine the name of the resource, was already part of the "standard" resource manager "framework" library that I use as a template. The -s option was added last. It controls the starting count, and after the first draft of the code was completed, I got bored with the fact that it always started at zero, and wanted to provide a way of getting an arbitrary count into the counter.