my attempt to do the exercises in sicp.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

sicp exercise 3.48




;; Exercise 3.48.  Explain in detail why the deadlock-avoidance method described above, (i.e., the accounts are numbered, and each process attempts to acquire the smaller-numbered account first) avoids deadlock in the exchange problem. Rewrite serialized-exchange to incorporate this idea. (You will also need to modify make-account so that each account is created with a number, which can be accessed by sending an appropriate message.)

;; Ans:
;; if both processes acquire the mutex in the same order, deadlock can be avoided. By checking the account number and locking the least numbered account maintain the same order.


(define (serialized-exchange account1 account2)
  (let ((serializer1 (account1 'serializer))
        (serializer2 (account2 'serializer)))
    (if (< (account1 'getid) (account2 'getid))
        ((serializer1 (serializer2 exchange)) account1 account2)
        ((serializer2 (serializer1 exchange)) account1 account2))))

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