Re: Marble Clock

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

gattamaneni abhiram <abhiram.gattamaneni@gmail.com> writes:

> Thank You for the help. I completed the coding part using stacks for
> the trays and a Queue for the reservoir.

Good to hear it!

>                                          I am stuck at a point, I need
> to determine the number of 12-hour cycles the clock goes through
> before the marbles in the reservoir are back in their original order
> (relative to the number of input marbles used to fill the
> reservoir). Can you help me with this?

You could give each marble a position number with something like

   type Marble (Position : Positive) is null record;

and check at the end of each cycle whether the marbles are now in order.

Are you using Ada.Containers.*Synchronized_Queues? If not, you'll
probably be able to get access to the queue contents to do this check;
but if you are, you'd need to pop the items, check they're in order, and
requeue.

      In_Order : Boolean := True;
   begin
      for J in 1 .. Reservoir.Current_Use loop
         declare
            M : Marble;
         begin
            Reservoir.Dequeue (M);
            Reservoir.Enqueue (M);
            if M.Position /= J then
               In_Order := False;
            end if;
         end;
      end loop;

If you do this, you'll need to redefine Marble above to allow M.Position
to be changed: either supply a default

   type Marble (Position : Positive := 1) is null record;

or make it a component

   type Marble is record
      Position : Positive;
   end record;