my attempt to do the exercises in sicp.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

sicp exercise 3.45



;; Exercise 3.45.  Louis Reasoner thinks our bank-account system is unnecessarily complex and error-prone now that deposits and withdrawals aren't automatically serialized. He suggests that make-account-and-serializer should have exported the serializer (for use by such procedures as serialized-exchange) in addition to (rather than instead of) using it to serialize accounts and deposits as make-account did. He proposes to redefine accounts as follows:

(define (make-account-and-serializer balance)
  (define (withdraw amount)
    (if (>= balance amount)
        (begin (set! balance (- balance amount))
               balance)
        "Insufficient funds"))
  (define (deposit amount)
    (set! balance (+ balance amount))
    balance)
  (let ((balance-serializer (make-serializer)))
    (define (dispatch m)
      (cond ((eq? m 'withdraw) (balance-serializer withdraw))
            ((eq? m 'deposit) (balance-serializer deposit))
            ((eq? m 'balance) balance)
            ((eq? m 'serializer) balance-serializer)
            (else (error "Unknown request -- MAKE-ACCOUNT"
                         m))))
    dispatch))

;; Then deposits are handled as with the original make-account:

(define (deposit account amount)
((account 'deposit) amount))

;; Explain what is wrong with Louis's reasoning. In particular, consider what happens when serialized-exchange is called.

;; Ans:
;; when serialized-exchange is called, the serializer is invoked twice. once by the serialized-exchange and once more by the (account 'withdraw) invoked from exchange.
;; So the whole process will lock upon itself.


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