my attempt to do the exercises in sicp.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

sicp exercise 3.44


;; Exercise 3.44.  Consider the problem of transferring an amount from one account to another. Ben Bitdiddle claims that this can be accomplished with the following procedure, even if there are multiple people concurrently transferring money among multiple accounts, using any account mechanism that serializes deposit and withdrawal transactions, for example, the version of make-account in the text above.

;; (define (transfer from-account to-account amount)
;;   ((from-account 'withdraw) amount)
;;   ((to-account 'deposit) amount))

;; Louis Reasoner claims that there is a problem here, and that we need to use a more sophisticated method, such as the one required for dealing with the exchange problem. Is Louis right? If not, what is the essential difference between the transfer problem and the exchange problem? (You should assume that the balance in from-account is at least amount.)

;; Ans:
;; Louis is not right. The exchange problem and transfer problem are different. The exchange problem involving two accounts makes the two accounts dependent on each other. while the transfer problem doesnt do so. The account being deposited doesnt care where the amount being deposited is coming from.




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