a native simple wc in Emacs Lisp

I googled "count words emacs" and read several articles, "Counting words in Emacs" and "Emacs Tip: Word counting with a regular expression". The first uses a loop and a regular expression to count only words in a region, and the latter uses the emacs built-in function "how-many" to count words in the whole current buffer. So I combined them to the following `wc` function which count in the whold buffer when no region is active and in the region otherwise.

(defun wc ()
  "a simple mimic of the linux command `wc`"
  (interactive)
  (message "Word count: %s"
           (how-many "\\w+"
                     (or (and (region-active-p) (region-beginning)) (point-min))
                     (or (and (region-active-p) (region-end)) (point-max)))))