SICP Exercise 3.51 showing delayed evaluation

Exercise 3.51.  In order to take a closer look at delayed evaluation, we will use the following procedure, which simply returns its argument after printing it:

(define (show x)
  (display-line x)
  x)

What does the interpreter print in response to evaluating each expression in the following sequence?59


(define x (stream-map show (stream-enumerate-interval 0 10)))
(stream-ref x 5)
(stream-ref x 7)

 SOLUTION

 The code and tests are here.

 Note: I spent a lot of time tracing through the logic to see what really happens here. The delayed evaluation of items in streams combined with new streams being produced in procedure stream-map makes it really confusing. 

 Also, note that in Racket, both the car part and the cdr part of the stream are delayed evaluations until the point of need.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SICP Exercise 2.56 differentiation rule

Image
Exercise 2.56.    Show how to extend the basic differentiator to handle more kinds of expressions. For instance, implement the differentiation rule by adding a new clause to the  deriv  program and defining appropriate procedures  exponentiation? ,  base ,  exponent , and  make-exponentiation . (You may use the symbol  **  to denote exponentiation.) Build in the rules that anything raised to the power 0 is 1 and anything raised to the power 1 is the thing itself. SOLUTION The code and tests are here .
Read more

SICP Exercise 1.28 (Miller-Rabin Test)

Exercise 1.28.    One variant of the Fermat test that cannot be fooled is called the  Miller-Rabin test  (Miller 1976; Rabin 1980). This starts from  an alternate form of Fermat's Little Theorem, which states that if  n  is a prime number and  a  is any positive integer less than  n , then  a  raised to the ( n  - 1)st power is congruent to 1 modulo  n . To test the primality of a number  n  by the Miller-Rabin test, we pick a random number  a < n  and raise  a  to the ( n  - 1)st power modulo  n  using the  expmod  procedure. However, whenever we perform the squaring step in  expmod , we check to see if we have discovered a ``nontrivial square root of 1 modulo  n ,'' that is, a number not equal to 1 or  n  - 1 whose square is equal to 1 modulo  n . It is possible to prove that if such a nontrivial square root of 1 exists, then  n  is not prime. It is also possible to prove that if  n  is an odd number that is not prime, then, for at least half the numbers a < n , co
Read more

SICP Exercise 4.18 a alternative strategy for interpreting internal definitions

Exercise 4.18.   Consider an alternative strategy for scanning out definitions that translates the example in the text to (lambda < vars >   (let ((u '*unassigned*)         (v '*unassigned*))     (let ((a < e1 >)           (b < e2 >))       (set! u a)       (set! v b))     < e3 >)) Here  a  and  b  are meant to represent new variable names, created by the interpreter, that do not appear in the user's program. Consider the  solve  procedure from section  3.5.4 : (define (solve f y0 dt)   (define y (integral (delay dy) y0 dt))   (define dy (stream-map f y))   y) Will this procedure work if internal definitions are scanned out as shown in this exercise? What if they are scanned out as shown in the text? Explain. SOLUTION & DISCUSSION The streams based procedure 'solve' in this exercise exposed several issues in my metacircular evaluator implementation. I discovered that streams are not at all handled properly by my evaluator. Moreover, the &
Read more