Re: No top schools use Ada

[brh@cray.com (Brian Hanson)]

In article 798344756@gnat, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> Regarding using Ada to teach computer science
>  Scheme is a different issue: to me it is limiting to live only in the
>  functional world. For example, today I was presenting heapsort. The
>  essence of this algorithm is the in place tree mapping, that's what
>  makes the algorithm interesting.
Huh?  Over in the comp.lang.scheme there have been long drawn out arguments
about how scheme is not really a functional language as it is not a pure
functional language.

I have written a number of significant programs in scheme and never
really written in functional style.

Scheme is a lean and elegant lisp.

;; The following sorts are short but horribly inefficient

(define (insertion-sort a)
  (do ((i 1 (+ i 1)))
      ((>= i (vector-length a)) a)
    (do	((v (vector-ref a i) v)
	 (j i (- j 1)))
      ((or (< j 1) (< (vector-ref a (- j 1)) v))
       (vector-set! a j v))
      (vector-set! a j (vector-ref a (- j 1))))))

(define (swap! a i j)
  (let ((v (vector-ref a i)))
    (vector-set! a i (vector-ref a j))
    (vector-set! a j v)))

(define (bubble-sort a)
  (do ((i (- (vector-length a) 1) (- i 1)))
      ((< i 0) a)
    (do ((j 1 (+ j 1)))
	((> j i))
      (if (> (vector-ref a (- j 1)) (vector-ref a j))
	  (swap! a j (- j 1))))))

(define l (list 1 5 7 8 2 4 1 5 6 2))

(define (run sort a)
  (sort a)
  (display a)
  (newline))

(run insertion-sort (list->vector l))
(run bubble-sort (list->vector l))

$ vscm
> (load "../src/scm/sort.scm")
#(1 1 2 2 4 5 5 6 7 8)
#(1 1 2 2 4 5 5 6 7 8)
;value (after 170ms... comp: 0 (0 GC), exec: 170 (0 GC)):
#t
> 

-- 
-- Brian Hanson
-- brh@cray.com