Heterogeneous lists

Summary: We delve more deeply into Scheme’s list data type. We consider, in particular, how and why to make lists that contain different kinds of values.

Introduction: Representing data

As we’ve said, computer scientists study both the algorithms we write to manipulate information and the ways in which we represent information. We’ve looked at one way of representing collections so far, lists. As we’ve explored lists, we’ve focused on lists that contain all the same kinds of values, mostly lists of numbers. We call such lists “homogeneous lists”. But lists can contain mixtures of kinds of values. We call lists with mixtures of kinds of values “heterogeneous lists”.

An Example: UFO sightings

Here’s one example of a heterogeneous list. Consider the list of UFO sightings available at http://www.ufocasebook.com/casefiles.html. For each sighting we have a year, a name, a date (or date-like description), a location (mostly a country), a Yes/No for effect, media, contact, and abduction. (You can look at the page for what each of those mean.) We might therefore represent each entry as an eight element list.

• Element 0 is the year, which we will represent as an integer.
• Element 1 is the name, which we will represent as a string.
• Element 2 is the date, which we will represent as a string. (We generally prefer year, month, day for dates. But those are not available in this case.)
• Element 3 is the location, which we will represent as a string.
• Element 4 indicates whether or not there was a physical effect; we will represent it as a Boolean value (#t or #f).
• Element 5 indicates whether or not there are associated media; once again, we will represent it as a Boolean value.
• Element 6 indicates that contact was made; yet again, we will use a Boolean value.
• Element 7 indicates that someone was abducted; as you might guess, we’ll use a Boolean value.

For example, here’s what we might see for one entry.

'(1969 "The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky" "Mar, 1969" "Russia" #t #t #t #f)

Why did we start with zero, rather than one? Because lists, like strings, are “zero indexed”. The index represents the number of items that come before the element.

How do we extract the different elements from the list, either to display them or compare them? The most straightforward is to use list-ref, a two-parameter procedure that takes a list and an index as inputs and returns the item at that index.

> (list-ref sverdlovsky 0)
1969
> (list-ref sverdlovsky 1)
"The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky"
> (list-ref sverdlovsky 2)
"Mar, 1969"
> (list-ref sverdlovsky 3)
"Russia"
> (list-ref sverdlovsky 4)
#t

Scheme also provides two other operations to extract values from lists: car extracts the first element (element zero) and cdr returns a list containing all but the first element.

> (car sverdlovsky)
1969
> (cdr sverdlovsky)
'("The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky" "Mar, 1969" "Russia" #t #t #t #f)

Building lists

We’ve been building new lists using list or make-list. But what if we have an existing list and we want to add an element to the front? Say, suppose we want to add a unique identifier to each sighting, such as 'ufo023. Scheme provides an operation called cons that builds a new list by adding a value to the front of the list.

> (cons 'ufo023 sverdlovsky)
'(ufo023 1969 "The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky" "Mar, 1969" "Russia" #t #t #t #f)
> sverdlovsky
'(1969 "The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky" "Mar, 1969" "Russia" #t #t #t #f)
> (define sample (cons 'ufo023 sverdlovsky))
> sample
'(ufo023 1969 "The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky" "Mar, 1969" "Russia" #t #t #t #f)

Why is it called cons instead of list-prepend or something similar? Well, that’s the name John McCarthy, the designer of Lisp, chose about fifty years ago. “cons” is short for construct, because cons constructs lists. (The custom of naming procedures with the basic type they operate on, a dash, and the key operation did not start until a few decades later.) The names car and cdr were chosen for very specific reasons that will not make sense for a few more weeks. For now, just accept that you’re learning a bit of computer-ese.

Nested lists

But what if you want to have more than one list, such as when we want to study all of the UFO sightings? We can make a list of lists. We’ll consider that topic in a related reading.

Building lists, revisited

You’ve now seen a variety of ways to build lists. You can use the list procedure. You can use the make-list procedure. You can use cons to prepend a value to a list. Suppose you prefer to build lists with cons. How can you get started, given that cons expects a list as one of its parameters? You start with the empty list.

Scheme’s name for the empty list is a pair of parentheses with nothing between them: (). Most implementations of Scheme permit you to refer to that list as nil or null. You can also create it with (list). All permit you to describe the empty list by putting a single quote before the pair of parentheses.

> '()
'()
> nil
'()
> null
'()
> (list)
'()

You will find that we prefer to use a name for that list. If sample code does not work in your version of Scheme, try inserting the following definitions.

(define nil '())
(define null '())

Note that by using cons and nil, we can build up a list of any length by starting with the empty list and repeatedly prepending a value.

> (define singleton (cons "Russia" null))
> singleton
'("Russia")
> (define doubleton (cons "Mar, 1969" singleton))
> doubleton
'("Mar, 1969" "Russia")
> (define tripleton (cons "The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky" doubleton))
> tripleton
'("The Russian Crash - Sverdlovsky" "Mar, 1969" "Russia")
> (cons "senior" (cons "third-year" (cons "second-year" (cons "freshling" null))))
'("senior" "third-year" "second-year" "freshling")

You may note that lists built in this way seem a bit “backwards”. That is, the value we add last appears at the front, rather than at the back. However, that’s simply the way cons works and, as the last example suggests, in many cases it is a quite sensible thing to do.

List predicates

Scheme provides two basic predicates for checking whether a value is a list. The null? predicate checks whether a value is the empty list. The list? predicate checks whether a value is a list (empty or nonempty).

> (null? null)
#t
> (list? null)
#t
> (null? (list 1 2 3))
#f
> (list? (list 1 2 3))
#t
> (null? 5)
#f
> (list? 5)
#f

Other common list procedures

It turns out that you can build any other list procedure with just null, cons, car, cdr, null?, and some other programming techniques. Nonetheless, there are enough common operations that most programmers want to do with lists that Scheme includes them as basic operations. (That means you don’t have to define them yourself.) Here are a few that programmers frequently use. You may have seen some of these before.

length

The length procedure takes one parameter, which must be a list, and computes the number of elements in the list. (An element that happens to be itself a list nevertheless contributes 1 to the total that length computes, regardless of how many elements it happens to contain.)

> (length null)
0
> (length (list 1 2 3))
3
> (length (list (list 1 2 3)))
1

append

The append procedure takes any number of arguments, each of which is a list, and returns a new list formed by stringing together all of the elements of the argument lists, in order, to form one long list.

> (append (list "red" "green") (list "blue" "yellow"))
'("red" "green" "blue" "yellow")

The empty list acts as the identity for append.

> (append null (list "blue" "yellow"))
'("blue" "yellow")
> (append (list "red" "green") null)
'("red" "green")
> (append null null)
'()

cadr and company: Combining car and cdr

To reduce the amount of typing necessary for the programmer, many implementations of Scheme provide procedures that combine car and cdr in various ways. These procedures begin with the letter “c”, end with the letter “r” and have a sequence of “a”’s and “d”’s in the middle to indicate the sequence of calls to car (for an “a”) or cdr (for a “d”). For example, cadr computes the car of the cdr of a list (the second element), cddr computes the cdr of the cdr of a list (all but the first two elements), and caar computes the car of the car of a list (applicable only to nested lists).

> (define rainbow (list "red" "orange" "yellow" "green" "blue" "indigo" "violet"))
> (cadr rainbow)
"orange"
> (cddr rainbow)
'("yellow" "green" "blue" "indigo" "violet")
> (caddr rainbow)
"yellow"
> (cdddr rainbow)
'("green" "blue" "indigo" "violet")

Summary of new list procedures

null Standard list constant.

The empty list.

(cons value lst) Standard List Procedure.

Create a new list by prepending value to the front of lst.

(cdr lst) Standard List Procedure.

Get a list the same as lst but without the first element.

(car lst) Standard List Procedure.

Get the first element of lst.

(null? lst) Standard list predicate.

Checks if lst is the empty list.

(list-ref lst n) Standard List Procedure.

Get the nth element of lst. Note that elements are numbered starting at 0.

(length lst) Standard List Procedure.

Return the number of elements of list lst.

(append lst_0 lst_1 ... lst_n) Standard List Procedure.

Create a new list by concatenating the elements of lst_0, lst_1, … lst_n.

(caar lst) Standard List Procedure.

If lst’s first element is a list, gets the first element of that first element, the the car of the car of lst. If lst is not a list, or its first element is not a list, reports an error.

(cadr lst) Standard List Procedure.

Get the second element of lst, the car of the cdr of lst

(cddr lst) Standard List Procedure.

Get all but the first two elements of lst, the cdr of the cdr of lst

(caddr lst) Standard List Procedure.

Get the third element of lst, the car of the cdr of the cdr of lst.

Self Checks

Check 1: List procedures

Predict the results of evaluating the following expressions.

(cons 2 null)
(cons 1 (cons 2 null))
(cons 5 (list 1 2))
(caddr (iota 7))
(list-ref 2 (iota 7))
(append (iota 2) (iota 2))
(list (iota 2) (iota 2))
(append (iota 2) null)
(list (iota 2) null)
(cons (iota 2) null)

You may verify your predictions using DrRacket, but be sure you understand the results.