Symbols and lists

Exercise 1

Start DrScheme. Call the cons procedure to create a list that has the number 1 as its first and only element.

Exercise 2

Describe the value of the expression

(cons 'alpha (cons 'beta (cons 'gamma (cons 'delta null))))

and check your answer by asking DrScheme to evaluate this expression.

Exercise 3

Call the procedure list, supplying the numerals 17 and 43 as operands. Describe the value returned by the procedure.

Exercise 4

How would you call the list procedure to create a list containing the symbols alpha, beta, and gamma, in that order?

Exercise 5

How would you invoke the list procedure to create an empty list?

Exercise 6

Is it possible to create a list in which the same element occurs more than once? Find out by experiment.

Exercise 7

What is the cdr of a one-element list?

Exercise 8

It makes no sense to apply the car and cdr procedures to an empty list, because there's no way to split off the ``first element'' of a list that has no elements. What happens if you try it anyway? Find out by having DrScheme evaluate a deliberately incorrect procedure call.

Exercise 9

Use Scheme to give the name Greek-letters to the list constructed by the expression (list 'alpha 'beta (list 'gamma-1 'gamma-2) 'delta). Then call the length procedure to confirm that it has four elements.

Exercise 10

Determine the length of the empty list.

Exercise 11

Write a Scheme procedure call to create a list of length 5. (For this exercise, I don't care what elements you put into the list.) Check your answer by having Scheme compute the length of that list.

Exercise 12

Use Scheme to compute the reversal of the list whose elements are the symbols senior, junior, second-year, and first-year, in that order.

Exercise 13

If a list has another list as one of its elements, does reverse reverse that inner list as well as the outer one? Find out by experiment.

Exercise 14

Use Scheme to find the result of stringing together a list with the symbols alpha and beta as its elements and a list with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 as its elements. How many elements does the resulting list have?

Exercise 15

Invoke the procedure list, applying it to the two lists that you strung together in exercise 14: a list with the symbols alpha and beta as its elements and a list with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 as its elements. How many elements does the resulting list have? The answer to this question is different from the answer to the question at the end of exercise 14 -- why?

Exercise 16

Write a call to the procedure cons, applying it to our favorite two lists: a list with the symbols alpha and beta as its elements and a list with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 as its elements. How many elements does the resulting list have? Why is the answer to this question different from the answers to the questions at the end of exercises 14 and 15?

Exercise 17

Write a call to the list-ref procedure that will extract the fourth element of the list (38 72 apple -1/3 sample) -- namely, the number -1/3.