add README and LGPL license
.gitignore
ignore files ending in ~
sketch the idea of a simple stats collector

there is a bug in the code, however ....

I will have to look into that later.
d'oh! need to skip the header row
no sense in including the delimeter in the return value
initialize min to DBL_MAX and max to -DBL_MAX, not zero
remove duplicate function declarations
make C++ friendly