You can not select more than 25 topics Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.
sicp-all-tasks/sicp/1_002e6

34 lines
793 B

Exercise 1.6: Alyssa P. Hacker doesn’t see why
if needs to be provided as a special form. “Why can’t I just define it
as an ordinary procedure in terms of cond?” she asks. Alyssa’s friend
Eva Lu Ator claims this can indeed be done, and she defines a new version of
if:
(define (new-if predicate
then-clause
else-clause)
(cond (predicate then-clause)
(else else-clause)))
Eva demonstrates the program for Alyssa:
(new-if (= 2 3) 0 5)
5
(new-if (= 1 1) 0 5)
0
Delighted, Alyssa uses new-if to rewrite the square-root program:
(define (sqrt-iter guess x)
(new-if (good-enough? guess x)
guess
(sqrt-iter (improve guess x) x)))
What happens when Alyssa attempts to use this to compute square roots?
Explain.