Lab Review Guideline for Labs 4, 6, 7 & 8

This page is intended merely as a guide and should in no way be construed as exhaustive.

Advice:

Be sure to give examples when creating data definitions! This was the cause of many problems in the S-expressions homework (HW 5)!

Family Trees

• Defining non-linear data structures
• Creating templates based on non-linear data structures
• Navigating through trees

Natural Numbers

• Numbers as lists
• Recurring over a number

Mutual Recursion

• Data structures consisting of multiple, linked data structures
• Program structure to process a mutually recursive data structure (use of helpers).

Accumulators

• How to write an accumulator style function using helpers
• Using accumulators to retain information about the outer layers of the recursion process to be used in the inner layers of the recursion, e.g. find last element algorithm.

Locals

• To eliminate multiple identical calculations
• To define symbol equivalents of values to simplify later code
• To hide helper functions

Abstract ("higher order") functions

• Functions that take functions as arguments
• Lambda (anonymous) functions
• Curried functions -- functions that produce functions whose behavior depends on how they were made.
• To abstract whole processes that involve other functions, e.g. map, filter, foldr, foldl