Higher-Order Procedures

• Exercises
  • Exercise 0: Preparation
  • Exercise 1: Making Lists
  • Exercise 2: Dot-Product
  • Exercise 3: Why apply?
  • Exercise 4: Right section
  • Exercise 5: Powers of Two
  • Exercise 6: Removing Elements
  • Exercise 7: Intersection
  • Exercise 8: Filtering
• Notes

Exercises

Exercise 0: Preparation

If you have not done so already, please scan the corresponding reading on higher-order procedures.

Exercise 1: Making Lists

a. Define and test a generate-list procedure that takes two arguments: (1) a one-argument procedure, proc, that can be applied to a natural number and (2) n, a natural number. Your procedure should generate a list of length n whose ith element is the result of applying proc to i. For example,

> (generate-list (lambda (x) (* x x)) 6)
(0 1 4 9 16 25)

b. Define and test a generate-lister procedure that takes one argument -- a one-argument procedure, proc, that can be applied to a natural number -- and generates a new procedure that takes one parameter, a natural number, n, and returns a list of length n whose ith element is the result of applying proc to i.

Exercise 2: Dot-Product

Define a procedure, dot-product, that takes as arguments two lists of numbers, equal in length, and returns the sum of the products of corresponding elements of the arguments:

> (dot-product (list 1 2 4 8) (list 11 5 7 3))
73
; ... because (1 x 11) + (2 x 5) + (4 x 7) + (8 x 3) = 11 + 10 + 28 + 24 = 73

> (dot-product null null)
0
; ... because in this case there are no products to add

Use apply and map to give an extremely concise definition of this procedure.

Exercise 3: Why apply?

Sarah and Steven Schemer suggest that ``apply is irrelevant. After all,'' they say, ``when you write

(apply prog (arg1 ... argn))

you're just doing the same thing as

(proc arg1 arg2 ... argn)

.''

Given your experience in the previous exercise, are they correct? Why or why not?

Exercise 4: Right section

In the reading, you saw how we might define left-section, which fills in the left of the two arguments of a binary procedure. Define and test the analogous higher-order procedure right-section, which takes a procedure of two arguments and a value to drop in as its second argument, and returns the operator section that expects the first argument. (For instance, (right-section expt 3) is a procedure that computes the cube of any number it is given.)

Exercise 5: Powers of Two

Using the generate-lister procedure from you defined earlier and an appropriate operator section, define a procedure powers-of-two that constructs and returns a list of powers of two, in ascending order, given the length of the desired list:

> (powers-of-two 7)
(1 2 4 8 16 32 64)

Exercise 6: Removing Elements

Here is an interesting list of natural numbers:

(define republican-voter-ids (list 1471 4270))

Define a Scheme procedure remove-republicans that takes a list of non-empty lists as its argument and filters out of it the lists in which the first element is also an element of republican-voter-ids.

Exercise 7: Intersection

a. Define intersection (given two lists, return the list containing only elements that appear in both lists) using remove and right-section.

b. Rewrite intersection so that it takes an arbitrary number of lists as parameters.

Exercise 8: Filtering

The filters constructed by remove are designed to exclude list elements that satisfy a given predicate. Define a higher-order procedure make-filter that returns a filtering procedure that retains the elements that satisfy a given predicate (excluding those that fail to satisfy it). For instance, applying the filter (make-filter even?) to a list of integers should return a list consisting of just the even elements of the given list.

Notes